Every other VPN is different from ZeroTier. I would say a large additional job of ZeroTier is direct connection facilitation between two endpoints rather than route all traffic through a server.

If you have two computers behind NAT, the ZeroTier will help you punch through your NAT and let the computers talk to each other directly. It does it extremely well, and I haven't seen anything like it.

Cool thing is, it can do everything that a normal VPN can. When the other commenters talk about them hosting the 'server'. They're talking about configs, etc. Traffic doesn't usually go through their servers. Just in rare cases where your ISP is really hell bent of preventing you from UDP hole punching.

People always forget about ZeroTier's network flow rules. In a little text file/field, you have a full-on software-defined networking appliance, with filters on any kind of Layer 3-4 information, and a capability model. You could regulate a medium corporate network in about 50 lines, giving people capabilities as required or segmenting areas with tags. And it would work exactly the same whether laptops were inside the building or not. And you can do mad stuff like 'copy all TCP traffic with dport X to some machine running tcpdump'. The whole thing is a dream. I love it.

I personally use it as a replacement for AWS VPN Gateway using a ZT managed route and a couple of VPC route table entries. I detail that setup in my ZeroTier Terraform plugin: https://github.com/cormacrelf/terraform-provider-zerotier

How we moved to Google Cloud using Consul and ZeroTier with zero downtime | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15548642 (Oct 2017)

I haven't looked at ZeroTier since they made those feature additions. I'll have to check them out.

EDIT: Just did. This[1] is amazing.

[1]: https://www.zerotier.com/manual.shtml#3_4

This. Performance is superb, and the connections are direct. Stable, super simple.

Highly underrated and too much under the radar afaik

You can self host it for free. ZeroTier looks to charge $100/mo just to let you self host.

AFAIK you can run your own ZeroTier controller for free. It's just not documented too well and also it's missing the web UI for managing your networks.

I ended up writing a CLI to do it that's relatively full-featured. At some point, I intend to move functionality to a shared library between a CLI and a Web frontend, but for now, the CLI works tremendously well for my use cases:

https://github.com/FrankPetrilli/ZeroTier-Controller-CLI

They charge for management of large networks on their controller.

You can run your own controller fir free, and it's also open source iirc, but it's not as nice (no web ui) and you're fully on your own.

It's $100/month for licensing our web interface for controller management. You're free to set up your own network controller and write your interface for managing it :)

Ah, excellent! I have only used zerotier with them hosting. Would far prefer to self-host. Thanks for pointing that out!

I know this is old, but there's one thing that is a big advantage for tinc, and it's that it supports TCP P2P

If you're behind a restrictive firewall ZeroTier won't be able to punch through it, and will fall back to forwarding packets (encrypted) through ZeroTier servers, Even if a connection could've been made over TCP to the other client (because his firewall supports UPnP or is port forwarded) which creates a tunnel directly between them.

Note that UDP connections are always better for encapsulating TCP, but P2P TCP is better then TCP through an external server with limited bandwidth.

I'm a ZeroTier user though, and i've only encountered this to be a problem once. It's nice to know it'll always work well though.

Configuration & ease of use: ZT > Tinc Connectivity: Tinc > ZT

I know ZeroTier people are looking into solving this, so this might soon be obsolete information :)

Also tinfoilhats might prefer Tinc considering there's no central service anywhere.