wg-easy vs Headscale

wg-easy and Headscale both let you run your own VPN on a small VPS instead of paying for a commercial service, and both are about as light as self-hosted software gets. But they are built on opposite network models, and that single difference — not features or footprint — is what should decide between them.

Hub-and-spoke vs. mesh

wg-easy is a classic hub-and-spoke WireGuard VPN with a friendly face. You run one WireGuard server, and every device you enroll gets a tunnel to that server. Traffic between two of your devices, or out to the internet through the VPN, routes through the central box. The whole thing is managed from a clean web UI — add a client, scan a QR code, download a config — so there is no hand-editing of wg0.conf or juggling keypairs. It is the fastest way to stand up a private VPN for remote access or a full-tunnel exit node, and it uses the standard WireGuard client that is already on every platform.

Headscale is a mesh. It is an open-source implementation of the Tailscale coordination server — the control plane that Tailscale keeps proprietary — and nothing else. Your devices keep running the official Tailscale apps, but pointed at your Headscale server instead of Tailscale's cloud. Once coordinated, peers connect directly to each other wherever a path exists, falling back to a relay only when they truly can't. The server's job is coordination, not carrying your traffic, so it never becomes the bottleneck that a hub-and-spoke server can be.

What that means in practice

The models trade off in predictable ways. wg-easy's hub-and-spoke design is dead simple to reason about and administer — one server, one place to look — but every byte between two peers takes two hops through the central VPS, and your throughput and latency are bounded by that box and its location. Headscale's mesh gives you direct, lowest-latency peer-to-peer links and automatic NAT traversal, which scales far better as you add devices and sites — at the cost of a more involved mental model and a CLI-only server with no web UI of its own.

The hub model isn't always the weaker one, either. Because all traffic passes through the central server, wg-easy is the natural fit when routing through a specific location is the whole point — a full-tunnel exit node that makes your traffic appear to come from the VPS, reaching a service that must see a single stable IP, or giving a whole team one shared egress address. A mesh optimizes for the opposite goal (direct device-to-device links), so for "send everything out through this one box in this one country," the hub design is exactly what you want, and wg-easy makes it a two-minute job.

Footprint and setup

Neither will strain a cheap VPS: both run comfortably in around 256 MB of RAM. The difference is in the setup experience. wg-easy is a single container with a web UI and a genuinely gentle learning curve (this site rates it a 2/5 to deploy). Headscale is also a single lightweight Go binary, but you configure it from a YAML file and administer it entirely through the headscale CLI — creating users, issuing pre-auth keys, listing nodes — which nudges it to a 3/5. wg-easy is AGPL-3.0; Headscale is BSD-3-Clause and still pre-1.0, so read its release notes before upgrading.

Which to choose

Choose wg-easy when you want the simplest possible self-hosted VPN: remote access to a few machines, a full-tunnel exit node to route your traffic through a location you control, or a road-warrior setup you can manage from a browser in minutes.

Choose Headscale when you want a real mesh — many devices and sites talking directly to each other without funneling everything through one server — and you already like Tailscale's polished official clients and want to keep using them against a control plane you own.

A useful shortcut: if the word that describes your need is "VPN into my server," that is wg-easy; if it is "connect all my devices to each other," that is Headscale. Both need only a small public VPS to run on — the box is the coordination point for Headscale and the tunnel hub for wg-easy — so either way, a cheap instance is all it takes to stop renting your private network from someone else.