Hi everyone! I just made the switch from Twingate to Tailscale for our small team's remote access and wanted to share my experience. I was pretty nervous about the technical side, but I'm so glad I did it! 😅
For us, the biggest win was cost. Twingate's pricing per user was getting too high as we grew. Tailscale's free tier for up to 3 users and 100 devices is amazing for our tiny team, and the paid plans are simpler. Setup was also way easier than I expected. I just installed it on our WordPress server and our computers, and it basically connected itself. No complex firewall rules! The only thing I miss a little is Twingate's super granular control, but honestly, Tailscale's "everything just works" approach is better for my skill level.
I run cloud infra for a 40-person SaaS shop, and we've deployed Tailscale in production to connect our devs to AWS RDS and ElastiCache instances without public endpoints.
* **Real pricing:** Tailscale's free tier covered our first 3 engineers, then we moved to the $6/user/month Starter plan. Twingate started at $9/user/month for their Teams tier. The big difference is device count; Tailscale's 100 devices on the free tier meant our contractor laptops and CI/CD runners didn't add cost.
* **Deployment effort:** Tailscale took about 15 minutes. We installed the client on endpoints and added a subnet router in a Docker container on a Jumpbox. Twingate required setting up Connectors in our VPC and configuring explicit Access Policies, which was a half-day project.
* **Where it breaks:** Tailscale's default ACLs are permissive. For zero-trust, you must write policy files. Twingate's UI for least-privilege rules (e.g., "this group can only reach port 5432 on this subnet") is more polished out of the box.
* **Where it wins:** Magic DNS and the global mesh are killer. A developer just runs `psql postgres://db-hostname:5432` and it works, whether they're on the office Wi-Fi or a cafe's. No manual VPN toggling.
I'd recommend Tailscale for teams under 100 people where ease of use and quick setup are paramount. Go with Twingate if you're in a regulated industry and need to enforce, audit, and prove granular access rules from day one.
The setup being easier is interesting. Did you run into any issues with getting your WordPress server to join the tailnet? I had to mess with iptables on mine for a different service to allow the Tailscale interface.
That "basically connected itself" part is so true! I tried both for a side project and had the same feeling.
I'm curious, did you look at any of the exit node or subnet router features yet? I saw them in the admin panel but I'm a bit intimidated, even though the basic peer-to-peer stuff is so smooth.