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Polfence vs Tailscale

WireGuard mesh VPN · Tailscale Inc., Toronto, Canada

Tailscale is the best-known WireGuard mesh. Its NAT traversal is excellent, the client runs almost everywhere, and for a team that wants peers to reach each other with as little configuration as possible it is hard to beat. If that is your whole requirement, Tailscale is a good answer.

Polfence is aimed at European organisations that need more than a mesh: identity-aware access to individual apps, device posture that blocks stale devices, just-in-time grants, DNS filtering, DNS hosting and monitoring, and the compliance paperwork (DPA, NIS2 assessment, audit export) that comes with running that under EU law. It is a broader, more opinionated platform from an EU-owned vendor, with a flat plan price instead of a per-user one.

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Feature by feature

Reviewed September 2026. Tailscale details are taken from public documentation; plans and features change, so confirm with the vendor before you decide.

Capability	Polfence	Tailscale
EU data residency, EU-owned vendor	Yes Polish company, hosted in Paris and Amsterdam	No Canadian company; control plane and relays outside EU jurisdiction
GDPR DPA included	Yes Available in the dashboard	Check vendor DPA offered by the vendor; check processing locations
NIS2 readiness report	Yes Article 21 assessment + printable report	No
ZTNA, per-app least privilege	Yes	Partial Network ACLs by host and port; no app-level identity proxy
Device posture checks	Yes Disk encryption, firewall, screen lock, OS version	Yes Device posture on higher plans
Just-in-time access	Yes Request, approve, time-boxed grant	Check vendor Check vendor for current access-request features
SSO + SCIM provisioning	Yes OIDC (Entra ID, Google, Okta) + SCIM 2.0	Yes SSO required; SCIM on higher plans
DPI-resistant tunnel	Yes Perimeter engine, obfuscated WireGuard	Partial Plain WireGuard; falls back to DERP relays over TLS
Site-to-site router configs (plain WireGuard)	Yes UniFi, MikroTik, pfSense, OPNsense, OpenWrt	Partial Subnet routers run the Tailscale client; no plain WireGuard export
DNS filtering resolver	Yes Polfence Shield, DoH, EU upstream	No MagicDNS resolves names, it does not filter
Authoritative DNS + zone kill switch	Yes	No
Dynamic DNS (dyndns2)	Yes	No
Remote desktop	Yes Polfence Connect, consent-gated	No Tailscale SSH for shells, no desktop
Uptime monitors + public status pages	Yes HTTP/TCP/DNS, public /s/ pages, badge	No
Public API	Yes REST v1 + OpenAPI	Yes
Audit trail + signed webhooks	Yes HMAC-signed, Slack/Teams/JSON, CSV export	Yes Audit log and webhooks on higher plans
Pricing model	Flat plan per account: Free, Pro and Business monthly. Enterprise on request.	Per user per month; free personal plan

available partly or with limits not offered unsure, check vendor— not applicable

Why teams switch to Polfence

A DPA, an EU-owned vendor and EU-only processing without a transfer impact assessment.
Access per application, not per subnet, with device posture and time-boxed grants.
Plain WireGuard configs for the routers already on site instead of a client on every subnet.
An obfuscated tunnel for networks that block WireGuard.
DNS filtering, DNS hosting, dynamic DNS and uptime monitoring under the same login and bill.
A flat monthly plan rather than a per-user price that grows with headcount.

Where Tailscale is stronger

NAT traversal and peer-to-peer connectivity are more mature; direct connections succeed in more network conditions.
Clients for more platforms, including Linux distributions, NAS appliances and containers.
MagicDNS, Taildrop and Tailscale SSH are polished conveniences Polfence does not replicate.
A large community and third-party ecosystem.

Other comparisons

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