Netbird: an alternative to TailScale and Zerotier

[Music] thank you hey everybody in this video we're going to take a look at a product called netbird this is another overlay network type product it does use wire guard on the back end so it's very similar to something like tail scale let's get into it all right okay so here we are on the netbird website and I want to jump right into the pricing real quick so this is free for up to five users and 100 machines and again you get the same type of things on the back end that you get with tailscale peer-to-peer connection encryption SEO with Google workplaces Azure and OCTA access controls private DNS Network routes and management activity logging there also is a self-hosted version if that is something you're interested in for our purposes today we're going to go with the service through their website and we're going to get this set up so if you go to try for free you will be presented with a page where you can either sign in or you can sign up and so I'm going to quick enter my credentials all right so I've entered my credentials for my new account and so we need to jump over and verify through an email link and I'm actually just going to grab my phone to do that welcome to netbird confirm email address and so we just say continue we'll say continue here time to add your first device so I'm going to go ahead and grab the installer for Mac OS allow and let's see what we've got here and is the arm 64 version click that continue install and we're going to go ahead and get this installed background items added keep that you can manage this in login items okay so right here wire trusty ug ly and that's turned on so that's good so now up here in the menu bar we've got the option to connect or go directly to the admin panel since we have connected our first device we'll say reload and see if that picks it up and then we'll say connect there okay authorize app accept login successful close the window see what we've got going on here now and just like that we've got the Mac Mini 2020 connected and it's got an IP address in the 100.97.235 subnet okay so and we say add peer we want to do Linux and we can copy this command okay we're going to go ahead and connect to our Ubuntu server all right and then we are going to paste in the curl command to grab the installer from netbird.io and we're going to run that and that goes ahead and downloads the necessary packages okay so netbird did complete so now we can jump back over here and we need to do netbird up all right uh please do the SSO login in your browser if your browser didn't open automatically use this URL to log in so this is a server machine so we need to use the URL called do copy and I'll come over here paste that into a browser window and we will confirm that machine so now if we refresh over here we do in fact have two machines set up so we are going to Ping from the Ubuntu machine we're going to Ping 100.97.235.228 we get the response back like we'd expect and from the Mac Mini we can ping 100.97.170.77 and again we're getting the response back that we'd expect so if we do on the Mac if config that into less we're going to see on one of these we will see a 100 so here's our main IP address and if we come down here a little further we should see right here 100.97.235.228 and likewise on the Ubuntu server we've got the local IP address we've got zero tier which I've already got on this and then if we come down a little more we should have 100.97.170.77. so that is working as expected and so just for the sake of argument if we say add peer uh you can see that this is supported on Linux Windows Mac OS Android and docker so that leaves out uh BSD which some of the others do support so for instance zero tier and one of the reasons I still find zero tier compelling is because uh you can get it on the Apple app store Google Play Store Windows Mac OS Linux you can get it on I believe that's for Synology Nas as well as BSD I suppose there's an argument to be made uh if you prefer the wire guard protocol as the back end uh versus the custom protocol that under pins zero tier you may find tailscale or netbird to be uh more suited to your needs now since on a personal basis I jump around and use pretty much all of the listed operating systems except for iOS I may use netbird to complement zero tier to use it for specific use cases but I will probably keep zero tier around until one of the other products gets support for BSD Unix all right just for the sake of argument we're on the tail scale page now real quick and I just wanted to show that other than Mac OS if you count that as a BSD derivative other than Mac OS the support you get on tailscale is the same as what you get on netbird uh Mac OS iOS Windows Linux Android and in fact that may uh actually it actually has one additional because uh netbird does not have IOS so again this is one of those situations where you want to examine your use case uh are you an iOS user if you're an iOS user then you'll want to use either zero tier or tail scale if you're an Android user then you can use pretty much any of them and if you're a BSD user well you're gonna go towards zero tier if this is something you want to do unless there's an alternative out there that I have not yet discovered that does affect support BSD that has been a first look at netbird I will be doing some additional testing in the coming weeks and uh see if I can do some comparisons between netbird and zero tier which I've been using for the last four or five years and see if there's a really compelling reason to choose one over the other again if your operating system is not supported by one then your choices are going to be obvious uh but if you are on the Android side of things and you use Linux Windows or Mac OS you're basically uh open to use any of the products that fit in this space uh tail scale netbird or zero tier and I'm sure there are some others out there that I have not yet tested out all right that does it for this video if you haven't done so already please go down below and like And subscribe and I'll see you in the next video have a great day

Channel: Practical IT with Jeremy Leik

Views: 3,549

Keywords: netbird, netbird setup, overlay network, remote access, sdwan, tailscale, virtual private network, vpn, vpn alternative, what is overlay network, wireguard vpn, zerotier

Id: svm5_Ge1Wf8

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 21 2023