Tailscale (and similar services) is an abstraction on top of Wireguard. This gives you a few benefits:

1. You get a mesh network out of the box without having to keep track of Wireguard peers. It saves a bunch of work once you’re beyond the ~5 node range.

2. You can quickly share access to your network with others - think family & friends.

3. You have the ability to easily define fine grained connectivity policies. For example, machines in the “untrusted” group cannot reach machines in the “trusted” group.

4. It “just works”. No need to worry about NAT or port forwarding, especially when dealing with devices in your home network.

Tailscale uses wireguard, which is better in a lot of ways compared to OpenVPN. It's far more flexible, secure, configurable and efficient. That said, you probably won't notice a significant difference

OpenVPN is far from "no fuss", especially when compared to Tailscale.

I like to self host things so I also self host Headscale (private tailnet) and private derp proxy nodes (it is like TURN). Since derp uses https and can run on 443 using SNI I get access to my network also at hotels and other shady places where most of the UDP and TCP traffic is blocked.

Tailscale ACL is also great and requires more work to achieve the same result using OpenVPN.

And Tailscale creates a wireguard mesh which is great since not everything goes through the central server.

You should give it a try.

Tailscale is much more reliable in my experience. OpenVPN isn't very reliable in my experience as a network admin. And IPsec is an abomination.

Any reason you didn't just set tailscale DNS to ad guard? I have set it to controlD

With pangolin you are exposing it otside your private network right? Its public website. That might be undesireable for security.

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Not GP. My guess is that they’re self hosting this at home (not on a server that’s on the internet), and Tailscale easily and securely allows them to access this when they’re elsewhere.

Tailscale routes my mobile device dns through my pile back at the home. I have nginx setup with easy to remember domains (photos.my domain.com) that work when i’m away as well without exposing anything to the open internet.

In my words, I use Tailscale at home but not for this (yet). Tailscale is a simple mesh network that joins my home computers and phones while on separate networks. Like a VPN, but only the phone to PC traffic flows on that virtual private network.

Tailscale can give you domains + ssl for local services with basically no effort.

With tailscale on your server and endpoints you can access the server from anywhere without even having to open any ports. It is like magic.

Tailscale gives me access to my home network when I'm not at home. I can be on a train, in another country even, and watch shows streamed off the Raspberry Pi in my home office.