Tailscale

Tailscale puts all your machines on one private network. Install it, sign in with the same account everywhere, and every device can reach every other by name, wherever they are. No port forwarding, no VPN server, no firewall rules.

How I use it

Two Macs, a couple of cloud boxes and a phone are on one tailnet. I SSH to the machine at home by hostname from a café, I open a web app running on a server by its tailnet name instead of exposing it to the internet, and the cloud boxes have no open ports at all. That last part is the quiet win: there is nothing for a scanner to find. A second machine that runs scheduled jobs around the clock is reachable from anywhere, and when I am away I check on it from the phone.

What surprised me is that it just worked on the first try and has kept working, through hotel wifi, a router replacement and a cloud provider's own firewall. I do not remember the last time I opened the app. What annoys me is small. The admin console puts the simple view first and hides the settings you actually need, like key expiry, a click deeper. Access rules are a JSON policy you edit by hand, and the only way I have found to test one is to break something and read the error. And a laptop that goes to sleep drops off the network, which looks like an outage until you remember.

Who it is for

Anyone with more than one machine. A developer with a laptop and a home server, a small team with a shared box, anyone who has ever typed a public IP into an SSH command and felt uneasy. The free plan is generous enough that most people never pay. Skip it only if everything you own lives on one machine; then there is nothing to connect.