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> significant part of the value proposition of Tailscale is their very well designed web UI which makes managing their Wireguard based networks very user friendly.

I think this is an opinion. I don't use the tags/rules, and I literally only use their website to complete the oauth flow to auth a new client. Headscale is a perfectly functional replacement of Tailscale for me.

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I interviewed there and asked about this and they said their coordination server and (and other UI features UI) are almost completely about satisfying very demanding enterprise customers, with one of the major concerns being the performance particularly of applying ACL rules across huge complex networks.

They said there would be a lot of code cleanup to open source the coordination server, and it's not been completely ruled out but Headscale is such a nice alternative for those that care about an open source coordination server that it doesn't seem to be a big motivation.

I don't mean to downplay the value of Headscale, but only to make the point that it's quite a different beast to the Tailscale SaaS experience.

For the record I think Headscale is an impressive project.

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