I gave up and just setup wireguard directly instead, I don't trust Tailscale either if that's their attitude towards privacy, it's permanently marred my vision of their product.
There also exists an open source implementation of the tailscale control server [1] that you could self host.
People sometimes ask me to describe the differences between Nebula and Tailscale. One of the most important relates to performance and scale. Nebula can handle the amount of internal network traffic and scalability of nodes (100k+ nodes, constant churn) required on a large network like Slack's, but Tailscale cannot. Tailscale's performance is fine for many situations, but not suitable for infrastructure. It is just a fundamentally different set of goals.
Nebula was created and open sourced before Tailscale was offering their product, but their architecture is similar to older offerings in the market, and is something we purposely avoided when creating Nebula.
Fwiw, I even recommend Tailscale to friends who want to do things like connect to their Plex server or Synology or [other thing] at home remotely. It simplifies this kind of thing greatly and doesn't require you to set up any infrastructure you control directly, which can be a headache for folks who just want to reach a handful of computers/devices.
First thanks for working on Nebula! It's great.
Nebula seems to be about 95% there. The functionality it actually does provide once set up is really great. It's just missing the 5% that is arguably the most important for a huge number of people: a simple way to do the configuration management bits such as device enrollment, revocations, key rotations, that sort of thing.
If you are a home user, with a small network, the overhead of doing things manually is low, but you need to be patient and technical enough to read the docs and do it right initially. If you're a big enough organization I guess you can write your own tooling. But for any small shop or any non-technical home user this is not going to fly and you will bounce off it.
I don't know if the plan is to create a commercial offering for this side of the house (it would make sense...) but as far as I'm concerned, this is the only reason that Tailscale is so successful and Nebula is lesser known (despite Nebula's advantages in other ways that may be more relevant to technical users).
I will say that the OSS tooling of Nebula is everything someone needs to stand up an entire working network on every common platform (linux/mac/windows/ios/android), but there is a definite gap in simplification that we need to address to make it easier for smaller scale use cases.
We actually have a managed enterprise Nebula offering at my current gig, but that's rather a different market than Tailscale, so I'm avoiding talking as that company as opposed to a Nebula OSS project lead. The commercial offering is targeted at large enterprises, because that's the market where Nebula has unique advantages. It also means we don't currently have a freemium or smb type offering, and are not prioritizing creating one at all. I don't want to give people false hope that we will, and would prefer to see the OSS project improve to address the small-medium use cases.