Tailscale vs Macky for Reaching Your Mac from Your iPhone

People ask us how Macky compares to Tailscale, and the honest answer is they're different kinds of tools. Tailscale is a network. Macky is an app. But since both end up being ways to reach your Mac from your iPhone, the comparison is worth making properly.

What Tailscale actually does

Tailscale is a VPN built on WireGuard. You install it on all your devices and they behave like they're on one private network, wherever they physically are. It's genuinely great software, the free personal plan is generous, and if you run a homelab or manage several machines, it's worth having regardless.

But Tailscale only gets you the network. To actually use your Mac from your iPhone, you still need apps on top of it: an SSH client like Termius for the terminal, or a VNC viewer for the screen. Each of those needs its own setup on the Mac side, like enabling Remote Login or Screen Sharing. And VNC over a VPN on a phone works, but it's nobody's idea of smooth.

What Macky does

Macky skips the network layer entirely. The Mac app and the iPhone app connect to each other directly over WebRTC, which punches through routers and firewalls on its own. You sign in on both devices and connect. That's the whole setup.

On the phone you get the two things you actually wanted: your Mac's screen with full mouse and keyboard control, and a real terminal. The terminal is text-based rather than streamed video, so it stays usable on weak cellular connections. Everything is end-to-end encrypted with DTLS-SRTP, and your data never touches Macky's servers.

Side by side

Which one should you use?

If your goal is broad, like reaching a NAS, a few Linux boxes, and your Mac from lots of devices, Tailscale is the right foundation and you should use it.

If your goal is specific, like "I want my Mac on my iPhone without building anything," Macky gets you there in about two minutes. And the two aren't exclusive. Plenty of people run Tailscale for their infrastructure and use Macky for the Mac, because it's simply the faster path for that one job. More on the terminal side in our terminal guide.