The "No IT Department" part of your marketing immediately turns me off because that's actively encouraging "shadow IT".
We all get that sometimes companies have IT policies which are outdated and get in the way, but that's a problem for someone up the chain to solve. A team or department deciding to just start doing their own thing with something like this which isn't managed by or even known about by the official company IT is at best a path to future problems if not an immediate compliance problem.
Compliance, "up the chain", "department", "the official company IT", etc...
These are all things that the target audience either doesn't have, or doesn't want. If the above words are important to you, then you're probably not in the target market.
Not allowing random VPN connections on a LAN is pretty standard. I've been surprised at how many people here are able to use tailscale and the like. Guessing it's just because there are likely smaller teams here that don't have any kind of managed network.
Someone is making your IT team do extra work without a good understanding of their systems if they're banning tailscale or granting special network level access thinking that ip or mac address based profiling is secure.
Your network should be zero trust. That means you want to treat every host that connects as if it's on the public internet; the corollary to that is you should give your hosts access to the public internet, unrestricted, and treat your users like adults who don't need micromanaging or constant surveillance (do sane logging, ofc.)
If you need a host that's subject to continuous surveillance, design it as such and require remote access with MFA, and so on.
Give your end users as much freedom as possible, and only constrict it where necessary, or you're going to incentivize shadow IT, unintended consequences, and a whole lot of unnecessary make-work that doesn't contribute to security.
Unrestricted access forces change management, design choices, and policy to confront each user and device for the attack vector they are, and to behave accordingly.
Smaller teams, yes, but also it seems as though the SaaS explosion has led to many enterprises significantly relaxing the "hardness" of their network boundaries, at least when it comes to integration with companies whose services they depend on. I've seen Tailscale and tools like ngrok being approved to get into large enterprises who you might think wouldn't allow it. Some of these enterprises will set up a bastion in a DMZ to control that, but I've been surprised by how many don't do that.
That relaxation tends to have ripple effects - once you allow tunneling tools in for one purpose - like SaaS integration - then it becomes more normalized and people start using it for other purposes.
Can anyone explain to me (someone not so network security savvy) if there are any privacy or security concerns using a wire guard provider like this?
As I understand it, with traditional VPNs, you basically have to trust third-party audits to verify the VPN isn't logging all traffic and selling it. Does the WireGuard protocol address theses issues? Or is there still the same risk as a more traditional VPN provider?
This is not providing the same functionality as a "traditional VPN," in the sense that it does not do anything to your traffic going to the wider internet. With popular VPN services, they are an encrypted tunnel for all your internet traffic (some use the same protocol, WireGuard), but at the end of the tunnel they decrypt the message and send it to whatever website you requested, which is exactly what can cause those privacy issues you describe.
In this case, though, it creates an encrypted tunnel _only between your own devices_. This allows you to connect to all your devices, home desktop, phone, laptop, as if they were on the same network, allowing you to do fairly sensitive things like remote desktop without having to expose your machine to the public internet or deal with firewall rules in the same way.
Assuming this project is legitimate, then the only traffic this service would even touch would be those between your own devices, nothing related to public internet requests. And, on top of that, the requests should be encrypted the entire way, inaccessible to any devices other than the ones sending and receiving the requests.
There are many caveats and asterisks I could add, but I think that's a fairly straightforward summary.
Yep. Stating Github and providing a non existent Github link is a serious redflag which brings trust issues.
Either provide the Github (for whatever reasons) or remove the link from your website. I am assuming it is closed source.
Personally I don't trust new VPN solutions without published source code!
Alternatives: Tailscale with Headscale or better Self-hosted Netbird if one is a itty-bitty IT savvy.
Netbird (self-hosted) offers a lot lot more with the self-hosted solution.
- SSO
- Independent networks
- Superb policies / ACLs
- Keybased onboarding
- auto-expiration and a lot more like integrations and what not!
Tough to beat the Netbird Open source offering if one tends to spent a little time and effort (though not everyone's cup of coffee!)
Such can look at tailscale's offering since the free version of Tailscale offers more than what is offered here and all the client applications are open source and constantly updated.
If pricing is going to the only difference, (at a high level, everything under the hood looks similar - wireguard based, zero config, p2p mesh, port forwarding etc etc.,) bring a lot more trust by offering an open source version like others.
I use Twingate both for personal use (my home) and to access AWS EC2 servers (no public ips) and really love it. Very polished, easy setup. How does Netrinos compare?
Not really related to the product itself, but your landing page design looks close to the official Microsoft style which I dont have the best memories of..
It might be intentional to show the "seamless integration" to Windows users but my penguin loving soul got scared!
Thanks for that feedback. I share your feelings about Linux. It never occurred to us that it would be reminiscent of old MS days. We were going for "clean and uncluttered".
If it makes you feel better, all core development for Netrinos is done on Linux. Then, the code is adapted to work on macOS and Windows. Almost all of the code is cross-platform, including the UI. Only the implementation details are platform specific.
e.g. Linux uses nftables. MacOS uses pfctl. Windows, we had to write our own packet filter to avoid touching the often misconfigured Windows Firewall.
We all get that sometimes companies have IT policies which are outdated and get in the way, but that's a problem for someone up the chain to solve. A team or department deciding to just start doing their own thing with something like this which isn't managed by or even known about by the official company IT is at best a path to future problems if not an immediate compliance problem.
These are all things that the target audience either doesn't have, or doesn't want. If the above words are important to you, then you're probably not in the target market.
Edit: Just found this post https://netrinos.com/blog/tailscale-alternatives-2025, so it looks like main differentiator is pricing right now.
One isn't.
Your network should be zero trust. That means you want to treat every host that connects as if it's on the public internet; the corollary to that is you should give your hosts access to the public internet, unrestricted, and treat your users like adults who don't need micromanaging or constant surveillance (do sane logging, ofc.)
If you need a host that's subject to continuous surveillance, design it as such and require remote access with MFA, and so on.
Give your end users as much freedom as possible, and only constrict it where necessary, or you're going to incentivize shadow IT, unintended consequences, and a whole lot of unnecessary make-work that doesn't contribute to security.
Unrestricted access forces change management, design choices, and policy to confront each user and device for the attack vector they are, and to behave accordingly.
That relaxation tends to have ripple effects - once you allow tunneling tools in for one purpose - like SaaS integration - then it becomes more normalized and people start using it for other purposes.
As I understand it, with traditional VPNs, you basically have to trust third-party audits to verify the VPN isn't logging all traffic and selling it. Does the WireGuard protocol address theses issues? Or is there still the same risk as a more traditional VPN provider?
In this case, though, it creates an encrypted tunnel _only between your own devices_. This allows you to connect to all your devices, home desktop, phone, laptop, as if they were on the same network, allowing you to do fairly sensitive things like remote desktop without having to expose your machine to the public internet or deal with firewall rules in the same way.
Assuming this project is legitimate, then the only traffic this service would even touch would be those between your own devices, nothing related to public internet requests. And, on top of that, the requests should be encrypted the entire way, inaccessible to any devices other than the ones sending and receiving the requests.
There are many caveats and asterisks I could add, but I think that's a fairly straightforward summary.
Love to see the ecosystem of wireguard based services growing into different business segments, i.e. you targeting SMBs/small teams.
Not for me, but legitimate use case and product :)
Either provide the Github (for whatever reasons) or remove the link from your website. I am assuming it is closed source.
Personally I don't trust new VPN solutions without published source code!
Alternatives: Tailscale with Headscale or better Self-hosted Netbird if one is a itty-bitty IT savvy.
Netbird (self-hosted) offers a lot lot more with the self-hosted solution. - SSO - Independent networks - Superb policies / ACLs - Keybased onboarding - auto-expiration and a lot more like integrations and what not!
Tough to beat the Netbird Open source offering if one tends to spent a little time and effort (though not everyone's cup of coffee!)
Such can look at tailscale's offering since the free version of Tailscale offers more than what is offered here and all the client applications are open source and constantly updated.
If pricing is going to the only difference, (at a high level, everything under the hood looks similar - wireguard based, zero config, p2p mesh, port forwarding etc etc.,) bring a lot more trust by offering an open source version like others.
Only downsides are no mobile support & seems to be somewhat abandoned
Not really related to the product itself, but your landing page design looks close to the official Microsoft style which I dont have the best memories of..
It might be intentional to show the "seamless integration" to Windows users but my penguin loving soul got scared!
If it makes you feel better, all core development for Netrinos is done on Linux. Then, the code is adapted to work on macOS and Windows. Almost all of the code is cross-platform, including the UI. Only the implementation details are platform specific.
e.g. Linux uses nftables. MacOS uses pfctl. Windows, we had to write our own packet filter to avoid touching the often misconfigured Windows Firewall.