Tailscale on The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Well, the biggest difference between Tailscale and a traditional VPN is how the traffic flows. When you look at a traditional VPN, the traffic flows through a central hub and then out to your client devices on the back end. With Tailscale, every device makes a connection directly to every other device. That means effectively you're cutting out the middleman and you get much better performance as a consequence. And so that mesh network that you've built, you've got to have a way to control how the data flows between different devices because you don't have that central choke point anymore.