What is NetBird?
NetBird launched in 2021 and has grown to over 10,000 GitHub stars. In January 2026 the company closed a $10M Series A led by Pace Capital. The architecture is peer-to-peer: clients connect directly over WireGuard tunnels, brokered by a coordination server. Firewall traversal uses STUN/TURN when direct routing is not possible.
Read the full overview
The management plane provides SSO/OIDC user identity integration, access control rules, and activity logs from a single dashboard. NetBird operates in over 30 countries with teams in Europe, North America, and APAC relying on it for remote access and service-to-service connectivity.
WireGuard-based mesh VPN and zero-trust network access
Key capabilities
- Peer-to-peer WireGuard tunnels - automatic NAT traversal, no open inbound ports required.
- SSO integration - connect Okta, Azure AD, or Google for user-based access control.
- Network policies - group-based access rules defining which peers can reach which resources.
- Self-hosted control plane - run the management server and TURN relay on your own infrastructure.
- Activity logs - see which peers are connected and audit access events.
- Mobile clients - iOS and Android apps for remote workers.
Traditional VPNs were designed for the hub-and-spoke enterprise of 2005, not distributed teams and cloud workloads. NetBird's mesh topology keeps latency low and limits the blast radius of a compromised node by access policy, not network perimeter. The WireGuard foundation provides modern cryptography with a minimal attack surface - roughly 4,000 lines of kernel code versus OpenVPN's 100,000+.
“WireGuard-based mesh VPN and zero-trust network access”
Technical details
- Access
- Self-hosted
- Source model
- Open source
- Founded
- 2021
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- API
- Available
- Website
- netbird.io ↗
- GitHub
- Source repository ↗
What to verify
Profile audiences: DevOps Engineers, System Administrators, IT Teams.
- Confirm current features, licensing and support terms.
- Validate deployment, data location and access control.
- Test integrations, exports and recovery workflows.
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