We recently migrated away from our old OpenVPN deployment, and Zerotier was on the table. In the end we picked Tailscale because it’s based on open protocols and more transparent in how they work.

From a different perspective, it appears Zerotier is investing a lot of engineering efforts in maintaining its own protocol, with arguable benefits. Tailscale seems to be deploying new features on an almost weekly basis and are having huge velocity, and to me it just appeared their trade-offs made more sense, and I have more confidence in their business doing great on a long term.

yeah, different protocol. Similar concepts.

Tailscale has captured mindshare, reminds me some of Cloudflare. There are many solutions out there offering unique value props relative to what Tailscale is doing, and it all comes down to customer needs. I'm not sure how broadly Tailscale has been adopted outside of the dev / HN crowd, so that's always something to dig into.

Let’s just say that as the person who introduced Tailscale within our org, it has been one of the most easiest solutions I ever had to convince my org of. Given the relative intrusiveness of switching a VPN provider (it touches a lot of core infrastructure), I expected a lot more resistance, but everybody was on board immediately.

In all honesty, Tailscale being so good, we never seriously looked at Zerotier. We only evaluated it on paper, not actually tried to use it.

Zerotier doesn't have support for runnning without TUN devices without their "Business Source License"d libzt.

Being able to run Tailscale under otherwise very restricted userland environments, without changing too much code is nice.

I also use ZeroTier because I had several problems using TailScale on Android. They're known issues and don't seem like they'll ever be fixed.