coturn VS ice

Both TURN and STUN can be self hosted, the most popular project i have found is coturn

If you host yourself on a VPS you can hook in coturn (it's enabled by the linked playbook by default):

https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/b...

https://github.com/coturn/coturn

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).

Heads up to folks from Pion https://github.com/pion/ice.

Sixth, NetBird supports MFA and popular OpenID-compliant Identity Providers (IdP) like MS Azure, Okta, Google, Auth0, Keycloak, Zitadel, Authentik, etc. Available in the self-hosted version as well.

Seventh, NetBird is a European company headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Hence this might interest local European companies looking for local networking platforms.

Eighth, NetBird joined the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security incubator - the #1 cybersecurity research university. The program gives us direct access to cutting-edge research that we will use to optimize the technology.

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.