I finally understand Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnels

One thing that makes Cloudflare worse for home usage is it acts as a termination point for TLS, whereas Tailscale does not. If you use a Tailscale Funnel, you get the TLS certificate on your endpoint. With Cloudflare, they get a TLS certificate for you, and then strip and optionally re-add TLS as traffic passes through them.

I actually have no idea how private networks with WARP are here, but that's a pretty big privacy downgrade for tunneling from the Internet.

I also consider P2P with relay fallback to be highly desirable over always relaying traffic through a third party, too. Firstly, less middlemen. Secondly, it continues working even if the coordination service is unavailable.

I ended up building something in this space recently (TunnelBuddy – https://www.tunnelbuddy.net I’m the author) that lets you use a friend’s machine as an exit node over WebRTC.

One of the design decisions I made was P2P or nothing: there’s a small signalling service, but no TURN/relay servers. If the peers can’t establish a direct connection, the tunnel just doesn’t come up.

The trade-off is fewer successful connections in weird NAT setups, but in return you know your traffic never transits a third-party relay – it goes straight from your client to your friend’s endpoint.