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Comment by elcritch | Hacker News Reader

> We believe our new Tailscale Peer Relays connectivity option—unique to Tailscale—gives customers the best performance and flexibility.

Seems pretty similar to some of the stuff ZeroTier was doing years ago. Hard to claim it's unique to Tailscale. Charging for it above and beyond the per user costs seems overboard as well.

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I've used ZeroTier in the past and I don't recall a feature similar to this being part of their offering. What I do remember is home brewed crypto, incredibly poor single threaded performance, and a glacial development pace. Any thread about Tailscale inevitably brings up alternatives, but having tried many of them in the past, I've yet to find one that actually competes across all the features and performance. The comparisons to other solutions tend to give me "why do you need Dropbox when FTP exists?" vibes.

It's not clear to me if it's different than Zerotier's routing design or not. Partly because ZT has their "moons" and custom network controllers. Googling about it does seem to indicate ZT doesn't support peers routing traffic directly, but you can setup your own DERP style TCP relays.

To me Tailscale is just a nicer version of Zerotier but not in different genre like ftp vs Dropbox. From a general non-power users perspective they operate almost identically.

ZeroTier supports relaying natively. You create a network with three nodes, the "client" (on the internet), the "gateway" (public subnet) and the "server" (private subnet). ZeroTier will automatically route traffic between the client and server through your gateway with no configuration.

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