Alternatives to Husarnet
A peer-to-peer VPN that connects laptops, servers and microcontrollers directly, with built-in support for ROS. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Husarnet
A peer-to-peer VPN that connects laptops, servers and microcontrollers directly, with built-in support for ROS.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Husarnet.
Tailscale
Builds a private network between your own devices using WireGuard, without opening ports or running a server.
Tailscale builds a WireGuard mesh through NAT across desktop and mobile with a free Personal plan, but its coordination server is hosted and it has no ROS-specific tooling.
ZeroTier One
Puts machines anywhere in the world on the same virtual Ethernet network, as if they were plugged into one switch.
ZeroTier One joins devices into one Ethernet-level network with NAT traversal on many platforms, but relayed connections are slow and it lacks ROS tooling.
NetBird
A WireGuard-based mesh network with single sign-on, multi-factor authentication and access policies, self-hostable or managed.
NetBird offers open-source peer-to-peer WireGuard with SSO and access policies, self-hosted or managed, aimed at general machines and people rather than robot fleets.
nebula
Connect devices through an encrypted overlay network.
nebula is an MIT-licensed encrypted overlay network for desktop, server and mobile, but requires you to manage certificates and network configuration.
EasyTier
A decentralized mesh VPN written in Rust that links devices into one private network, with WireGuard support.
EasyTier links devices in a decentralized Rust mesh with no central server and WireGuard support, but needs more setup and much documentation is in Chinese.
tinc
A VPN daemon that builds an encrypted mesh network between hosts over the internet.
tinc builds an open-source full mesh with direct peer traffic between Linux hosts, but is configured by hand with config files.
n2n
A lightweight peer-to-peer layer-2 VPN for linking machines into a virtual network.
n2n links machines into an open-source layer-2 virtual LAN with peer-to-peer traffic, but needs a reachable supernode and manual command-line configuration.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
WireGuard
A small, fast VPN protocol and set of official clients that connect two machines by exchanging public keys.
headscale
A self-hosted, open-source implementation of the Tailscale control server, so your mesh VPN does not depend on a company.
Yggdrasil
An experimental, end-to-end encrypted IPv6 mesh network run as a lightweight userspace software router.
OpenZiti
An open-source zero trust networking platform that connects services by identity instead of IP address.
Netmaker
Self-hosted platform for building and managing WireGuard mesh networks.
