[rklaehn]

I work on iroh.

On the technical level, the biggest difference is probably that we build on QUIC whereas tailscale builds on wireguard. Iroh is a library that is made to embed into your application, whereas the tailscale offering started as a daemon. It allows embedding, but you are still carrying the baggage of a go runtime. Iroh is written in rust. Rust compiles to a native library and is therefore easier and more lightweight to embed in compiled programs (C, C++) and languages such as js and python.

Another big internal difference is that we use relay URLs whereas tailscale is using relay IDs. The consequence is that every iroh endpoint, no matter if using self-hosted relays, the n0 public relays, or the n0 paid relays, can reach any other. In tailscale two nodes will only be able to talk if they use the same mapping from relay id to relay ip address, which usually means that they use the same coordination server.

Last but not least, while we do have a commercial offering, everything you need to run iroh is open source, licensed MIT and Apache2. With tailscale the coordination server is closed source and operated by tailscale, and the only way to run your own tailnet is to use the headscale community project.