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tailscale vs cloudflare tunnel? which is better a homelab
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Tailscale. Because it can do both. It functions as a mesh VPN for private access, but it also has Tailscale Funnel which does the same thing as Cloudflare tunnels but you don’t give all your traffic to Cloudflare
Is there a specific reason tailscale having all the same traffic opposed to cloudflare is a better option? I use cloudflare tunnels right now and figured them handling some of the data is better than me by myself.
Tailscale shouldn't be getting your data anyway. It's a mesh VPN that directly connects devices after their auth server gives out certs and let's clients know where to find another. If you're not comfortable with using their server for this I'd suggest you look into the open source headscale server. I do remember it routing through their server in the rare case NAT punching doesn't work
Thanks for the info. Though I fail to see how it's much different than cloudflare tunnels, I'll probably stick with that for the near future but will try out tailscale funnel in the future.
It’s not functionally different from Cloudflare tunnels, that’s the point. You get the same functionality without giving all your data to a corporation.
I'm curious how if they're functionally the same, one has all the data and the other "shouldn't be getting your data anyway". Was mostly curious to hear about informed differences in the products but clearly not going to get that, cheers.
Because Cloudflare decrypts all your traffic, and Tailscale doesn’t. It’s still functionally the same though because you accomplish the game goal in a similar manner, but one is privacy respecting and one isn’t.
You can selfhosted tailscale so that they don't have any access. You can't with cloudflare tunnels as far as I know. Tailscale's client is open source, so is their Headscale server which originally was developed by a 3rd party. You can look into the code for that. Not sure what you'd want me to say. If you really want to be informed I'd inspect the code yourself
I'm self hosting cloudflared right now, the TLS from cloudflare terminates in a container in my network and then goes to my reverse proxy container for my local network. I'm definitely going to poke around tailscale and their funnels for the future, I'm just playing devils advocate for those replying not knowing anything about cloudflare tunnels yet saying they're the wrong choice.
Cloudflare tunnels definitely aren't wrong, you're just not entirely using open source software. It's a very good option if you need to open things to the public or want to learn more about cloud services
Well like... if you’d rather put your data in the hands of a company instead of your own when you could easily do the same thing yourself, why are you self hosting in the first place?
Just my two cents I'd prefer my traffic going through Cloudflare vs Tailscale if it's all the same, since I've heard a lot about Tailscale but know nothing. I've interacted on Github threads with people from cloudflare and they're all super nice and their blog posts and post-mortems are very insightful. Was curious to see if people had actual insight but appears it's just auto cloudflare = bad.
That’s the beauty of Tailscale, you don’t have to trust them, because they don’t MITM your data, unlike with Cloudflare. I’m sure the employees of Cloudflare are nice, but so are the employees of any company, good or bad. It’s not that Cloudflare is necessarily bad, but you’re putting them in a position of trust over the content of your data you send through them, as opposed to trusting no one.
I’m sure most of the people who work for Google are very nice people, but people still switch to self hosting for the privacy and control over their own data, and the same goes for Cloudflare.