Tailscale
Free tierWires all your devices into one private network — no router config
A WireGuard-based mesh network. Install it, sign in, and your laptop, phone and home server all get stable private IPs and can reach each other directly — no public IP, no port forwarding, no router configuration. The personal free plan covers 100 devices and 3 users.
Why we picked it
Reaching a machine at home traditionally means wrestling with public IPs, DDNS, port forwarding and firewall rules — and your ISP may not hand out a public IP at all. Tailscale skips the whole chain: install a client on each device, sign in with the same account, and they appear on one virtual private network where they can ping each other, and SSH, remote desktop and NAS access just work.
Technically it is a wrapper around WireGuard, so encryption and throughput come from WireGuard itself. It establishes peer-to-peer links wherever possible and falls back to a relay only when NAT traversal fails. In daily use the difference is hard to feel.
Its free boundaries need stating plainly, because they differ from most tools on this site:
- The client is BSD-licensed open source, but the coordination server is the company's SaaS and is not open.
- An account is mandatory (sign in via Google, GitHub, Microsoft and so on), which is why it does not carry the no-sign-up badge.
- The personal free plan allows 100 devices and 3 users — ample for home and solo development — but it is company policy, and policy can change.
If any of those is a dealbreaker, there are two exits: run the open-source Headscale as your own coordination server (Tailscale clients can be pointed straight at it), or write WireGuard configs by hand — more freedom, but key distribution and NAT traversal become your problem.
Verdict: functionally this is the best experience in the category, and the price is accepting one centralized sign-in step. Decide with that in view.