NetBird vs Headscale

NetBird and Headscale both give you a self-hosted, WireGuard-based private network without depending on a commercial control plane like Tailscale's. But they hand you very different amounts of the stack. NetBird is a complete product you run end to end; Headscale is a single missing piece you slot underneath someone else's clients. Choosing between them is really choosing how much of the system you want to own.

A full mesh vs. just the control plane

NetBird is a whole self-hosted mesh VPN. You run its control plane — the management, signal, and relay services — plus a web dashboard, and your devices connect using NetBird's own clients. It comes with SSO/OIDC login, access-control policies, and peer-to-peer connectivity with automatic NAT traversal, so it behaves like a self-owned Tailscale or Twingate. Everything, from the coordination server to the desktop client to the admin UI, is part of the same project.

Headscale is deliberately narrower. It is an open-source reimplementation of just the Tailscale coordination server — the one component Tailscale keeps proprietary — and nothing else. There is no Headscale client; you keep using the official Tailscale apps on every device, and they simply point at your Headscale server instead of Tailscale's cloud. That focus is both its strength and its limit: you inherit Tailscale's excellent, well-maintained clients, but you administer the server from the command line, because Headscale ships no web UI of its own.

Footprint and operational weight

Headscale is dramatically lighter. It is a single Go binary backed by SQLite or Postgres, happy on around 256 MB, so it tucks into the smallest VPS you can rent. NetBird runs several coordinated services and wants roughly 2 GB, because you are hosting the management API, the signal server, a relay/TURN service, and the dashboard rather than one process. If minimizing what you run — and what you pay for — is the priority, Headscale wins that comparison outright.

Identity, access control, and the admin experience

NetBird leans into being a product. The dashboard gives you a visual view of peers, groups, and access policies, and it integrates SSO so you can gate network access behind your identity provider — it even bundles one to get you started. For a team that wants role-based access and an audit trail without stitching tools together, that is a meaningful head start.

Headscale gives you the same underlying WireGuard mesh but expects you to drive it with the CLI and config files. Access rules are expressed in Tailscale's ACL policy format, which is powerful but text-based, and there is no first-party UI (community dashboards exist, but they are separate projects). It is a control server, not a management product, and it is happiest in the hands of someone comfortable with that.

Maturity

NetBird is past 1.0, has a large and active community (around 13k GitHub stars), and is actively developed, with a hosted cloud offering alongside the self-hostable core. Headscale is still pre-1.0 (the 0.2x line) and explicitly community-driven; it is stable and widely used, but the version number is an honest signal that you should expect the occasional breaking change and read the release notes before upgrading.

Which to choose

Choose NetBird if you want a complete, self-owned mesh with its own clients, a dashboard, and built-in access control — one project that does the whole job and is comfortable in a team setting. Choose Headscale if you are already a Tailscale user who trusts the official clients and just wants to self-host the coordination server on the smallest possible box, and you do not mind a CLI-only, pre-1.0 tool. A useful tie-breaker: if the appeal of self-hosting is "keep using Tailscale but on my own server," Headscale is the direct answer; if it is "own the entire stack, clients included," that is NetBird.

Either way, you need a public box

Whichever you pick, the coordination or relay server has to live on a routable, public VPS so your peers can discover each other and fall back to a relay when a direct connection is not possible. That server — small for Headscale, a bit larger for NetBird — is the piece you are actually self-hosting, and it is what turns either project into a working private network.