Tailscale vs NetBird Community Edition

Fit:

Migration notes

Re-enrol devices with NetBird clients and recreate identities, DNS, routing and access policies. Community includes networking but enterprise provisioning, approvals and flow observability require the commercial self-hosted license; Tailscale platform extensions are not interchangeable.

Sources: tailscale.com, docs.netbird.io, docs.netbird.io · checked 2026-10-21

TailscalePaid incumbent

Entry priceUSD 8 / seat / month

Pricing modelmixed, billed monthly

OwnerTailscale Inc.

Standard $8/seat/month. Resource and platform add-ons extra; Personal free plan is non-commercial. Monthly seat billing documented. Source

Tailscale plans reviewed
Personal	entry	Free
Standard	popular	USD 8 / seat / mo
Premium	business	USD 18 / seat / mo
Enterprise	enterprise	Quote only

NetBird Community EditionOpen-source alternative

Fit for Tailscale

License

BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License A permissive license similar to the <a href="/licenses/bsd-2-clause/">BSD 2-Clause License</a>, but with a 3rd clause that prohibits others from using the name of the copyright holder or its contributors to promote derived products without written consent. May Commercial useModificationDistributionPrivate use Must License and copyright notice No LiabilityWarranty Summary from GitHub's choosealicense.com

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 Permissions of this strongest copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications, which include larger works using a licensed work, under the same license. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. When a modified version is used to provide a service over a network, the complete source code of the modified version must be made available. May Commercial useModificationDistributionPatent usePrivate use Must License and copyright noticeState changesDisclose sourceNetwork use is distributionSame license No LiabilityWarranty Summary from GitHub's choosealicense.com

Paid-feature tier B

Self-host

Paid-feature limits1 noted

NetBird Community Edition plans reviewed
Community Edition	self-hosted community core	Free
Business	vendor commercial cloud	USD 12 / active cloud user / mo
Enterprise Commercial License	paid self-hosted enterprise licensing	Quote only

What you may give up

Enterprise Commercial License: active-active HA, SCIM provisioning, EDR/MDM integration, traffic-flow logging/streaming, peer approval, audit-event streaming and notifications.

Self-hosters operate control plane and relays; hosting and relay bandwidth have infrastructure costs.
MSP multi-tenant management is cloud-only.

Tier B: OSI community code: root BSD-3-Clause excludes management, signal, relay and combined directories licensed AGPLv3. Core connectivity/access control/routing remain community features; documented enterprise administration, approval and observability gates warrant B. NetBird Cloud tiers are separate from self-hosted Enterprise licensing. License source

What running it takes

Combined netbird-server (management, signal, relay, STUN) plus dashboard
Traefik or existing supported HTTPS reverse proxy

Hover or focus an icon for its name. Dashed means not established; struck through means no; grouped icons are alternatives.

Current combined setup, not older mandatory external IdP/Coturn multi-container instructions. Public domain and TCP80/443, UDP3478 required. SMTP not established as baseline dependency. Infrastructure and staff time are not priced here; this page does not compare total cost.