# NetBird 79 Hacker News commenters recommended NetBird and 25 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 2 years (6 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Recommended as an open source WireGuard mesh VPN that connects devices without manual firewall work and can be fully self-hosted. Common caveat: intermittent DNS and client connection failures. ## Why people recommend it - Open source, fully self-hostable (5 comments): "a fully open source alternative would be netbird, it's based on wireguard as well, has 0 closed components" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46524755)) "netbird has open sourced their _coordinator server_. This allows for self hosting to be end to end." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847300)) "been using it for about 6 months now with no complaints. Fully OSS, mobile clients, etc." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50019130)) - Seen as Tailscale alternative (3 comments): "I'm rooting for the devs, having an alternative for tailscale+headscale would be nice" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845710)) "Another tool to keep an eye on is Netbird which is like a tailscale like mesh" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48459384)) "Switched from Pangolin to Netbird recently and enjoy Netbird more!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762615)) - Automatic peer connections, no firewall hassle (3 comments): "For me the biggest thing tailscale/netbird solves is still the automatic handling of the peers, acls" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518166)) "WireGuard overlay networks (e.g. Netbird, Tailscale) basically solve that problem at home-user scale" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50013433)) "all my connected devices are reachable to each other without manual firewall hackery" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48725722)) - Works at enterprise scale (2 comments): "We've deployed self-hosted NetBird on AWS ECS and we're quite happy with the setup and the outcome." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854572)) "We have enterprises running NetBird with thousands of users with near zero issues." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46846987)) ## What people warn about - DNS resolution failures (4 comments): "mostly because of issues on laptops where resolving or networking would break" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845999)) "their service would fail when I tried to configure IPv6 nameservers for it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854303)) "DNS resolution failures occurred inconsistently—sometimes due to browser caching when accessing web resources, but often for no apparent reason." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847061)) - Client connections drop or fail intermittently (3 comments): "If the VPN connection would stay connected despite having it set up that way in the web UI.. It would be a good product." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845208)) "couldn't get it working reliably for 10-15% of users. The client failed intermittently with no clear pattern to troubleshoot." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46846275)) "Users on slow connections complained that they could not stay connected with services reliably." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46853246)) - Missing features like multi-network switching (2 comments): "My personal favourite one is Netbird but.. it lacks one feature: switching between multiple setups (networks)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847885)) "Missing some technical bits to be a true contender for me but I bet they are getting there." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845272)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Rayfish](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rayfish.md): 11 recommend - [Tinc VPN](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tinc.md): 6 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "NetBird", https://hackerapproved.com/p/netbird/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).