Yes: much easier to set up. It also provides a backup relay node system in case it can’t establish direct connection between your devices.

When you set up wireguard you have to update every system’s config to add a new device, Tailscale does this for you. That’s the key thing.

Got it. That is very nice.

I'm in the same boat. I set up wireguard network on my unraid server at my main house. Then set up a network to network bridge to another unraid server at my other house. My devices (really just my phone) can use either a phone to LAN connection or a complete tunneled connection to my server, from anywhere. My devices at either of my houses behave as if they're on the same network.

It wasn't very intuitive to set up but it took less than an hour and it has worked flawlessly for years. Unraid definitely made it a bit easier. Seems Tailscale almost completely solves that complexity for the initial setup and each additional device.

Wireguard is not an alternative to Tailscale, any more than FTP is an alternative to Dropbox. And not just because Tailscale actually uses Wireguard under the hood. Also if your comment is a sarcastic callback to the "why don't you just use FTP" comments when Dropbox came out, well done.

Wireguard is a great VPN protocol, but what the basic protocol doesn't do is make it transparently easy to use in a wide variety of edge cases without having to reconfigure anything. If all I want is two devices to be able to talk to each other, at least one of which is in a fixed ___location where I have total control over the network, then yeah, raw Wireguard is probably a decent solution. If I want to do anything else, I need a management layer on top of Wireguard, and Tailscale is by far the best solution for that out there.

As a thought exercise, consider a home network where a laptop connects to a NAS to store media files. I take the laptop to some random destination and connect it to hotel WiFi, while someone else takes the NAS to a totally different hotel and connects it to the WiFi. With Tailscale, the laptop can immediately directly access the NAS without even having to change the mount point. Think about what it would take to set up similar functionality with raw Wireguard. I'm not saying this is a common scenario, or that you can't do the same thing manually. But the fact that such a setup would just work is pretty impressive.

Ahh thanks for the example. That really clarifies it. I’m used to my NAS always being in one place, so I hadn’t encountered that scenario.

Tailscale uses wireguard