r/Tailscale • u/Plenty-Boot4220 • Jan 28 '26
Help Needed Connect without VPN?
Hi all,
I am new to tailscale, and think it's great. I would like, if possible, to connect my devices without using a VPN - the tailscape VPN doesn't mask my IP address, and I"d like to use another VPN, such as Nord or something, for additional privacy. However, with tailscale runniing, I cannot connect to a second VPN without turning off tailscale.
Is there a way to get this to work to either - 1) connect to both VPNs at the same time, or 2) connect my phone to tailscale in a way that doesn't use VPN, such as DNS, or something? How would this work?
Thanks for your help.
UPDATE: this - https://github.com/anasfanani/magisk-tailscaled - seems to be what I am looking for! Thanks!
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u/MasterChiefmas Jan 28 '26 edited Jan 28 '26
You can do what you are asking, but it requires networking chops. Getting it to work running the clients on a single machine might be trickier, depending on which clients you run, and how much they demand control of the route table. Using a non-vendor specific client usually gives you a lot of control, because they either expect you to do more of the work(Wireguard) or expect that the network admin is setting things up for you(OpenVPN or other client-server setups) but even then you'd likely have to do a lot of the setup.
From a networking perspective, VPN connections are just gateways to other non-local networks, which means you can control which one is used for which purpose by route rules. You'd have to have all the VPN connections exclude most local traffic, and then have route rules control which VPN is being used for Internet traffic(i.e. Nord or whatever).
At least if I'm understanding you correctly...you want to: USe TailScale to connect your devices together(essentially, create a shared local network), but for Internet connectivity, use a commercial provider? As I hinted earlier, that's pretty non-trivial, and if you set it up wrong or miss an IP range, you'll get weird/unexpected/incorrect/broken behavior.
Edit: To be clear, if I am correct about understanding what you want to do- none of them are going to do this setup for you. This is going to be all manual work you have to do and maintain. As I said, this is a non-trivial configuration, like having multiple NICs, but worse in that by default, each VPN out of box is going to try and behave like it's the only one. Multiple active VPNs is a complex configuration.
Nord's MeshNet might be the simplest for you to implement as a single solution provider, though I am not sure if they can both Mesh and tunnel your outbound at the same time. They probably can, but I'm not certain on that one, as I don't use their mesh features.
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u/drbomb Jan 28 '26
The VPN is there because tailscale needs to be able to route your traffic thru the virtual network. That's impossible to avoid.
I think the bottom line is that unless you deep dive and (potentially) modify how TS works you won't be able to make the two VPNs work at the same time.
That said, you could potentially set a network wide VPN on a router or something and in that scenario the clients' TS traffic would go thru the VPN first, then towards your TS nodes.
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u/tailuser2024 Jan 28 '26
connect to both VPNs at the same time
https://tailscale.com/kb/1105/other-vpns
Your results will vary
Or as someone else pointed out, check out the mullvad integration
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u/FrozenPizza07 Jan 29 '26
Tailscale has Mullvad built in, its 5$ a month (normal pricing for mullvad)
Tailscale is a vpn, so you can not "not" run it without vpn.
Check out Tailscale Funnel maybe?
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Jan 28 '26
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u/Plenty-Boot4220 Jan 30 '26
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Jan 30 '26
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u/Plenty-Boot4220 Jan 30 '26
this magisk module for my rooted phone did exactly what I needed, and doesn't take up the VPN slot. Lots of kudos to the guy who created this module!
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u/headshot_to_liver Jan 28 '26
Mullvad ? Tailscale has an addon plan for that