ChatSecure-iOS VS OnionShare

Compare ChatSecure-iOS vs OnionShare and see what are their differences.

ChatSecure-iOS

ChatSecure is a free and open source encrypted chat client for iOS that supports OTR and OMEMO encryption over XMPP. (by ChatSecure)
Our great sponsors
  • Appwrite - The Open Source Firebase alternative introduces iOS support
  • InfluxDB - Access the most powerful time series database as a service
  • SonarLint - Clean code begins in your IDE with SonarLint
ChatSecure-iOS OnionShare
5 119
3,090 5,542
0.2% 1.0%
0.0 9.1
8 months ago 13 days ago
Objective-C Python
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

ChatSecure-iOS

Posts with mentions or reviews of ChatSecure-iOS. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-10-06.

OnionShare

Posts with mentions or reviews of OnionShare. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-02-18.
  • Most straight forward way to share a file with someone?
    3 projects | reddit.com/r/privacy | 18 Feb 2023
    onionshare.org is p2p over the tor network, so very private but such a large file would strain the network
  • Peer to peer method for file transfers and messaging
    2 projects | reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides | 18 Dec 2022
    OnionShare is a multi-purpose tool that allows you to send and receive files and messages over Tor. I think this might be more aligned with your purposes, but with the caveat that this is a Tor-specific option (if I'm not mistaken).
  • Terraform for Tor Onion Services
    2 projects | reddit.com/r/TOR | 4 Dec 2022
    By default, it'll install the Onionshare utility to help with launching/managing some of the most common use cases for onion services. (You can also toggle it to NOT install by modifying deployment variables) You can find more in-depth instructions and deployment guides in the project's README file.
  • Securely share images
    5 projects | reddit.com/r/selfhosted | 30 Nov 2022
  • Peer-to-Peer Encrypted Messaging
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Nov 2022
    Briar is one of the most important secure messaging projects currently. Not only does it remove the need to trust the vendor about content (like with all E2EE messaging apps), you also get to keep the metadata about communication to yourself as data transits from one Tor Onion Service to another.

    The downside is of course, you need to keep the endpoint powered on when you want to be reachable so it will increase the battery drain on your phone.

    Note: There's also a desktop client if that's easier to keep online https://briarproject.org/download-briar-desktop/

    One extremely important thing Briar is doing, is it's using the P2P as means to host alternative social interaction formats, like forums and blogs. Similar to Signal/WhatsApp stories (which is somewhat similar to microblogs/FB wall), it's a way to indirectly share information. You could pretty much emulate any social media platform on top of E2EE protocol with ~zero infrastructure cost and without having to worry about data mining. I'd argue what Briar's innovating on here is one of the most important aspects in what's left for secure messaging.

    Finally a small caveat: Briar will share your Bluetooth MAC address with all peers so it can automatically use that when you're in close proximity with your peer. Thus sharing your Briar ID publicly is not a good idea for two reasons:

    1) major global adversaries may have access to that information (e.g. if Google aggregates it) which can deanonymize your account. This also allows slightly technical person to confirm identity of briar account if they suspect it's you (a bit wonky threat model but still).

    2) it ties everything you do across your accounts on same device together, so there's strong linkability even if you rotate the identity key by reinstalling the app.

    Briar is pretty clear about this in it's FAQ, but it's still not very well known although it definitely should be.

    ---

    That being said, if you want similar Onion Service based communication with no such linkability, there's https://cwtch.im/ which is a fantastic project.

    There's also https://www.ricochetrefresh.net/

    Both are spiritual successors to John Brooks' `Ricochet` application.

    You can also chat and share files (among other things) with https://onionshare.org/

    (And finally, you can get remote exfiltration security for keys/plaintexts with TFC https://github.com/maqp/tfc (my personal work), at the cost of losing some features like message forwarding etc that the architecture prevents you from doing.)

  • Speek tor p2p chat platform
    2 projects | reddit.com/r/TOR | 12 Oct 2022
    You can chat on https://onionshare.org/
  • OnionShare 2.6 – Released → (October 9, 2022)
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Oct 2022
  • What are some websites every person should know?
    4 projects | reddit.com/r/Piracy | 7 Oct 2022
  • Self hosting?
    4 projects | reddit.com/r/DataHoarder | 1 Oct 2022
    Small atom machine running this: https://onionshare.org/
  • How can I accept 3TB of data?
    10 projects | reddit.com/r/DataHoarder | 5 Sep 2022
    Onionshare if you want to share it anonymously. It would be really slow on the scale of three terabytes though.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ChatSecure-iOS and OnionShare you can also consider the following projects:

droppy

transfer.sh - Easy and fast file sharing from the command-line.

ProjectSend - ProjectSend is a free, open source software that lets you share files with your clients, focused on ease of use and privacy. It supports clients groups, system users roles, statistics, multiple languages, detailed logs... and much more!

Monal - Monal for XMPP (iOS and macOS)

ipfs.pics - Content-addressable, peer-to-peer method of storing and sharing images on the internet.

siskin-im - (M) Public Project of Tigase Messenger for iOS devices based on Tigase Swift XMPP library.

securedrop - GitHub repository for the SecureDrop whistleblower platform. Do not submit tips here!

lufi - Read-only mirror of https://framagit.org/fiat-tux/hat-softwares/lufi/

webwormhole - Peer authenticated WebRTC.

Go IPFS - IPFS implementation in Go [Moved to: https://github.com/ipfs/kubo]

Jirafeau

PictShare - :camera: PictShare is an open source image, mp4, pastebin hosting service with a simple resizing and upload API that you can host yourself. :rice_scene: