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ZeroTier is peer-to-peer, like Tailscale, and both of them maintain proxies, in case direct connection cannot be established.

The main difference (to Tailscale) is that ZeroTier doesn't need an identity provider, since each machine needs to be whitelisted in ZT admin panel.

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It very much needs an identity provider, only they implement it themselves instead of outsourcing it to Google/MS.

On Tailscale you also need to whitelist machines in the web console. There's probably an automated way to do it as well but I haven't looked into it since I only use it for a few static hosts.

I've migrated from ZT to TS about a year ago because ZT was much slower (network bandwidth-wise) and CPU-intensive than Tailscale on my setup. YMMV.

You can self-host the ZeroTier controller which is the identity provider and you an do so without breaking interoperability with the rest of the network.

I migrated off ZT because of weird instability of traffic with file ops on Samba shares and the MagicDNS.

MagicDNS is such a killer feature, all nodes are really hands off and I don't need to worry about IP addresses anymore

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