Alibaba Cloud VPN Gateway vs Tailscale

Alibaba Cloud VPN Gateway carries encrypted traffic between Alibaba Cloud VPCs and enterprise data centers, office networks, or Internet platforms over the Internet. It supports site-to-site networking and hybrid access through IPsec, IKE, and SSL VPN connections. Customers manage it through a visual console, API, or SDK, with integrations including ECS, VPC, NAT Gateway, RDS, and SLB. IPsec-VPN and SSL-VPN encrypt data in transit; SSL-VPN offers AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, and AES-256-CBC, with AES-128-CBC as default. Alibaba Cloud describes hot-standby failover in less than a few seconds, session continuity, and zero service downtime. Standard bandwidth reaches 1,000 Mbps total inbound and outbound, or 500 Mbps in some regions. Listed platforms include Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS through IPsec. Pricing is paid, with a $0.06 a month Chinese-mainland 10 Mbps connection and a $0.05 a month five-client SSL specification.

Tailscale is a zero-config VPN for connecting users and devices across a network. It uses WireGuard to form low-latency peer-to-peer connections, which Tailscale says are end-to-end encrypted so it cannot read users’ traffic. Administrators can use access control lists to specify which users may connect to which devices. Supported identity providers handle authentication, and SCIM supports user and group provisioning. Monitoring features include configuration audit logs, network flow logs, webhooks, and log streaming to SIEM partners. Device posture information can be used in connectivity rules. Taildrop transfers files between devices, while node sharing lets users share a node without exposing it to the public internet. The service runs on Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, web, and Windows. Personal is free forever for non-commercial use and supports up to six users; Standard costs $8 per user per month. Premium costs $18 per user per month and includes priority support.