Two things said plainly, because they are the two a reader needs before choosing:
Nothing about the protocol changes. offscale is headscale's open-source code
speaking to stock Tailscale clients, so a machine on an offscale network
behaves exactly as it would on either of the others. Worth stating outright —
"our own distribution" reads as a fork, and a fork of a network protocol is
something to be wary of. There is no offscale protocol to be locked into,
because there is no offscale protocol.
What changes is the work. Running headscale yourself is a project: install it,
put TLS in front of it, keep it upgraded, administer it through a config file
and a CLI. offscale makes that a step in a setup script.
"our own sugar on top" is gone. One marker left, in both the menu and the long
answer: the goodies are unnamed. Two or three specifics would be worth more than
the sentence they replace — every product claims extras, and the claim is only
interesting when it says which.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
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