head to head · open source
Tailscale vs OpenVPN
Tailscale has 38,534 GitHub stars, 3,411 forks, 4,569 open issues and last shipped yesterday. OpenVPN has 14,763 stars, 3,424 forks, 226 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Tailscale leads on adoption by 161% (38,534 vs 14,763 stars). Tailscale is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause; OpenVPN is written in C under a custom or non-standard licence. Tailscale has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, OpenVPN 23%. Tailscale was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (vpn), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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
| Tailscale | OpenVPN | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 39K | ★ 15K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | Custom / other |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.4K | ⑂ 3.4K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Tailscale if
- You weight community size — 39K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick OpenVPN if
- You want the OpenVPN feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and OpenVPN fits your workflow better
About Tailscale
Tailscale Private WireGuard® networks made easy Overview This repository contains the majority of Tailscale's open source code. Notably, it includes the tailscaled daemon and the tailscale CLI tool. The tailscaled daemon runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and to varying degrees on FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The Tailscale iOS and Android apps use this repo's code, but this repo doesn't contain the mobile GUI code. Other Tailscale repos of note: the Android app is at the Synology package is at the QNAP package is at the Chocolatey packaging is at For background on which parts of Tailscale are open source and why, see Using…
read the full Tailscale overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Tailscale or OpenVPN more popular?
Tailscale has 38,534 GitHub stars and OpenVPN has 14,763. Tailscale has the larger community by that measure.
Are Tailscale and OpenVPN free?
Both are open source. Tailscale is licensed under BSD-3-Clause, and OpenVPN has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Tailscale and OpenVPN?
Tailscale is written in Go and OpenVPN in C. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Tailscale or OpenVPN?
Choose Tailscale if you want the larger community (38,534 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose OpenVPN if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.