I don't know about Tailscale other than it's nice UI for a VPN, but seems like HN folk love it, although i would expect HN to be more cautious about something so important like direct access to your local network
Basically they have done a lot to engender good will from others.
* Easy installation and configuration
* Excellent NAT-traversal even when on CG-NAT
* iOS support
* Great performance, able to stream 4K video over the Internet
I've been looking for an alternative to Tailscale but so far all the ones I found fail in at least one of the above.
Edit: formatting
* Performance was never quite great, especially when NAT was involved. This may have improved, but I haven't used it in a while.
* NAT was hit-and-miss. It would usually work, but would not work frequently enough that I couldn't just count on it.
* Not really easy for some use-cases. Main one for me, having a router both for acessing my LAN from outside, and as a gateway to my home Internet (akin to a VPN service like e.g. Mullvad or PIA). It's possible, and I did use it that way but it required some iptables-fu and it would fail some times - when it did, I would lose all my ability to connect back. This is especially bad if I'm traveling, since I don't have physical access to the router to fix the config. This never happened with Tailscale.
I moved from Zerotier to Tailscale mainly for the fit and finish and Wireguard. Zerotier accomplished everything I wanted for my home network but was never "pretty." Tailscale is "pretty" and easy to use. MagicDNS makes accessing my devices easy as I don't have to set up my own DNS entries.
I moved our entire company off of OpenVPN and AWS VPN to Tailscale. It may not be as cheap anymore, but their networking ACLs and integration with Google/Microsoft for login have made it SO EASY to onboard new people and hardware.