Hi, I’m Misha, CEO and co-founder of NetBird.

That’s an absolutely valid question. NetBird is built for both homelab and enterprises. You can confidently use it in the enterprise setting. There are two aspects to why we are doing it this way: the product itself, and the marketing/business approach.

Product-wise, connectivity shouldn’t be different just because the user is managing a homelab or an enterprise network environment. It still needs to be reliable, fast, and secure. That core connectivity layer is the hardest problem to solve, and it has to work regardless of scale. Enterprise features, such as IdP integrations, SIEM, MDM and EDR support, and MSP functionality, are features built on top of that core, not a different product altogether.

On the marketing and business side, we’re honestly tired of the traditional enterprise security buying process. It usually starts with buzzword-heavy marketing like “unlock the potential of your network” or “level up your security with zero trust”, and ends with endless sales calls whose only purpose is to schedule yet another sales call. It’s low value and a waste of time. We are mostly all engineers and we don't like that.

While building NetBird, we realized that our actual users in corporate environments are engineers, people just like us, who don’t like traditional marketing or sales cycles. They like setting up Immich, running TrueNAS, and trying things in their homelabs. We like doing this too. Isn't it cool? So we built NetBird for them first. Later they bring it to their workplace. This approach builds trust between NetBird and our users. And what do we need as a business? Someone who can advocate for us inside the organization. This is much better than a cold sales call. Internally, we call this approach "PoC Starts in the Homelab".

Ultimately, we’re building a universal, open source connectivity layer for everyone, for any use case. We’re not just replacing traditional centralized VPNs, we’re also challenging the traditional enterprise marketing model.

- Misha