coturn VS netbird

You're welcome! If this is for mission-critical or commercial use, you will want to invest in a good TURN server to ensure a reliable connection between peers. You can either self-host your own Coturn server or pay for a service like Twilio. But if this is just a hobby project, you can just use the free Open Relay Project.

NetBird and Netmaker are similar in their capabilities and mesh offering, the same goes for Tailscale, but if we compare technical implementations, Netbird relies on the ICE and STUN protocols to discover the best path for p2p connectivity between peers. These are open WebRTC protocols with battle-tested software around them. Similarly, we use TURN for securely relaying traffic, when a p2p connection isn't possible (hard NAT). This protocol also comes from the WebRTC world and has stable and popular implementations like Coturn.

There are several options available both self-hosted and cloud provided services. A self-hosted option is to use the open source COTURN project and running it for example on an EC2 instance on AWS. The quickest way to get this up and running is to spin up an EC2 instance (ubuntu) running a Docker engine. To install Docker engine:

What does this do better than coturn (https://github.com/coturn/coturn)?

Audio/video calls is a matter of setting up a TURN server (either coturn or eturnal are typically used) and then putting the info in the Prosody config so it can inform clients. There is a short guide on setting up coturn for Prosody and eturnal shouldn't be too different.

Wiretrustee uses TURN to relay traffic in case a direct peer-to-peer connection isn't possible (happens with carrier-grade NATs).

Basically yes. The difference would be that we are trying to use more open source technologies and libraries instead of implementing our own. For example pion/ice from the WebRTC project and coturn for STUN and TURN. Both ice and coturn are used to go around NAT. We lack a peer management system that will allow to add peers dynamically. Tailscale and Zero tier have it but not open sourced. We plan to implement such a system and open source it.

Coturn as TURN relay server

And https://netbird.io/

I have to mention Netbird (netbird.io) also. Heavy development, but already a viable product, and most importantly. 100% Open Source and possible to selfhost.

Hello u/OneModdedGTI, we have a ticket open to supporting non-docker packaging for the core services as well: https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/issues/532

Hey folks, We've been working on adding a DNS management layer on top of a p2p overlay network - NetBird. And here it is, a new release makes it possible to access machines with domain names and configure private DNS. NetBird is open source, integrates with OIDC-compliant IdPs like Keycloak, and is fully self-hostable. I believe that many of you will enjoy this part :) Check it out and let me know what you think: https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/releases NetBird DNS docs: https://netbird.io/docs/how-to-guides/nameservers Self-hosting guide: https://netbird.io/docs/getting-started/self-hosting

Relevant Github issue: https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird/issues/46

We've been working on a p2p Wireguard-based overlay network for quite a while. it requires near-zero configuration and is fully open-source and self-hosted. Check it out and let me know what you think! https://github.com/netbirdio/netbird