head to head · open source
OpenVPN vs docktail
OpenVPN has 14,707 GitHub stars, 3,415 forks, 226 open issues and last shipped today. docktail has 1,287 stars, 49 forks, 5 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. OpenVPN leads on adoption by 1,043% (14,707 vs 1,287 stars). OpenVPN is written in C under a custom or non-standard licence; docktail is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. OpenVPN has attracted 23% as many forks as stars, docktail 4%. OpenVPN was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| OpenVPN | docktail | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 15K | ★ 1.3K |
| License | Custom / other | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-20 | 2026-10-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.4K | ⑂ 49 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick OpenVPN if
- You weight community size — 15K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick docktail if
- You want the docktail feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and docktail fits your workflow better
About OpenVPN
OpenVPN A Secure tunneling daemon Copyright (C) 2002 2026 OpenVPN Inc. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. To get the latest release of OpenVPN, go to: To Build and Install, tar zxf openvpn .tar.gz cd openvpn ./configure make make install or see the file INSTALL for more info. For information on how to build OpenVPN on/for Windows with MinGW or MSVC see README.cmake.md. For detailed information on OpenVPN, including examples, see the man page For a sample VPN…
read the full OpenVPN overview →
About docktail
🍸 DockTail Unleash your containers as Tailscale Services. DockTail watches Docker containers, reads docktail. labels, and exposes matching containers as Tailscale Services. App containers do not need published Docker ports by default; DockTail proxies directly to their Docker network IPs. Why DockTail? DockTail uses native Tailscale Services, not per container Tailscale devices. ¹ Depends on proxy and Docker network setup. ² Depends on the sidecar template and app network setup. ³ You configure how the service host reaches the backend yourself. ⁴ ScaleTail is template based, so each app usually starts from its…
read the full docktail overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is OpenVPN or docktail more popular?
OpenVPN has 14,707 GitHub stars and docktail has 1,287. OpenVPN has the larger community by that measure.
Are OpenVPN and docktail free?
Both are open source. OpenVPN has no licence declared in this registry, and docktail is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between OpenVPN and docktail?
OpenVPN is written in C and docktail in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, OpenVPN or docktail?
Choose OpenVPN if you want the larger community (14,707 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose docktail if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.