Tailscale vs ZeroTier: pricing and limits (2026)

These two don't actually compete on price so much as on what they're counting. Tailscale charges per *person* — around $6/user/month on its Starter tier. ZeroTier charges per *device*, sold in packs — about $18/month for Essential, which covers ten devices. Whichever looks cheaper for your situation depends entirely on your ratio of humans to hardware.

| | Free / personal | Entry paid | Power plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tailscale | Personal — free, up to 3 users / 100 devices | Starter — $6/user/mo (annual), $7 monthly | Premium — $18/user/mo |
| ZeroTier | Free — up to 10 devices | Essential — $18/mo (10 devices, +$2 each) | Scale — $179/mo (100 devices, +$1.80 each) |

A five-person remote team, each with a laptop and a phone, is a Tailscale situation almost by definition — each user brings a bundle of devices along (ten on Starter, twenty on Premium), so you're paying for the people, not counting every phone separately. Flip that around to a hundred headless IoT sensors reporting to two engineers, and ZeroTier's device-pack model is the one that actually maps to your infrastructure — you're not paying a per-user fee for machines that don't have users.

ZeroTier restructured its own pricing this year, replacing the older Professional/Business split with the current Essential ($18) and Scale ($179) tiers. Tailscale didn't touch its per-user pricing, and instead spent the year adding enterprise access-control features on top of it — the roadmap of a company that's decided its pricing model is settled and the differentiation is elsewhere.

Worth naming the alternative neither of these is: plain WireGuard, free, fast, and the actual protocol both Tailscale and (partly) ZeroTier are built on. You can absolutely run it yourself. What you give up is exactly what you're paying for here — key distribution, NAT traversal, and access-control lists all become your problem to solve by hand instead of a config toggle.

For most teams — a handful of people, a handful of servers, more humans than machines — Tailscale is both cheaper and dramatically simpler to set up; near-zero configuration is a genuinely accurate description of it. Reach for ZeroTier specifically when devices outnumber people by a wide margin, or when you want to run your own network controller rather than trust a vendor's.