dsnet VS Nebula

Compare dsnet vs Nebula and see what are their differences.

dsnet

FAST command to manage a centralised wireguard VPN. Think wg-quick but quicker: key generation + address allocation. (by naggie)

Nebula

A scalable overlay networking tool with a focus on performance, simplicity and security (by slackhq)
VPN
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dsnet Nebula
4 140
651 13,717
- 2.0%
0.0 8.6
6 months ago 1 day ago
Go Go
MIT License MIT License
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.

dsnet

Posts with mentions or reviews of dsnet. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-03-13.
  • Recommended VPN?
    6 projects | /r/selfhosted | 13 Mar 2023
    Yes, that is true. But there are projects that can simplify WG's deployment without compromising security like dsnet.
  • Android Client: multiple private keys?
    1 project | /r/WireGuard | 9 Aug 2022
    I have a config provided by a VPN provider, which generates the private key as well as the public (I think there's no way to provide a public key for them to use). I'm also using dsnet to generate peer configurations, and that also generates a new priv/pub key pair. The end result is that I have two different private keys, one for each endpoint. This (having multiple pub/priv pairs) is neither bad security[1], nor uncommon, and while it's trivial to have multiple Wireguard configurations running at the same time on Linux I haven't found a way to do this through the mobile app. This is because the app allows only one active Wireguard configuration at a time, and there's no facility for supplying two private keys within one Wireguard config file.
  • DSNet for WireGuard VPN: Like wg-quick but even quicker
    1 project | /r/CKsTechNews | 15 Jun 2022
  • Wiretrustee: WireGuard-Based Mesh Network
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jun 2021
    I made this: https://github.com/naggie/dsnet/ -- a simple command to manage a centralised wireguard VPN. Think wg-quick but quicker: key generation + address allocation

Nebula

Posts with mentions or reviews of Nebula. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-13.
  • JIT WireGuard
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Mar 2024
    (I am a Nebula maintainer.) We recently merged support for gVisor-based services, although it's very new, and I don't know of much experimentation that's been done with it yet: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/pull/965
  • Ask HN: What Underrated Open Source Project Deserves More Recognition?
    63 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Mar 2024
    Nebula, originally from Slack[0].

    Wireguard rightly gets a lot of attention, but Nebula is a really simple and easy to deploy mesh network that is often overlooked.

    It does lack a management GUI and that stuff is very much DIY.

    [0] https://github.com/slackhq/nebula

  • Nebula is Not the Fastest Mesh VPN (But neither are any of the others)
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2024
    Fair enough about the android mobile client... My use case only involves meshing linux appliances across various networks so we only need the nebula core binaries which are under MIT license

    https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/blob/master/LICENSE

  • Nebula is an open-source and free-to-use modern C++ game engine
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2024
    That's not at all confusing with Slack's Nebula. https://github.com/slackhq/nebula
  • A word of caution about Tailscale
    12 projects | /r/selfhosted | 9 Dec 2023
    Sounds like a bunch of your pain points are just related to needing an online CA or ICA. But, looking through the Nebula docs I don't know that it supports things like CRL addresses where you could host the CRL, or OCSP responders. Someone got support for an OCSP responder but never submitted a PR with completed code: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/issues/72
  • Free Tech Tools and Resources - Multi-clock Display, Networking Tools, Digital Forensics & More
    2 projects | /r/SysAdminBlogs | 17 Nov 2023
    Nebula is a scalable, cross-platform overlay networking tool focused on performance, simplicity, and security. This portable tool is equally adapted for linking a small number of computers or scaling to connect tens of thousands. It integrates encryption, security groups, certificates, and tunneling into a powerful, cohesive connectivity solution. Thanks for the recommendation go to jmeador42.
  • Would we still create Nebula today?
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Oct 2023
    Replying to my own comment as I can no longer edit it:

    The folks over at Slack had an interesting discussion regarding the the "battle of the VPNs" article published by Netmaker I sourced in my parent comment:

    https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/discussions/911

  • Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Aug 2023
    Interesting. I thought recognized the logo, apparently seems to be a commercial support offering of https://github.com/slackhq/nebula and they support the "nebula" iOS app. I had been using for nebula/defined in the past.
  • Which overlay network?
    6 projects | /r/selfhosted | 13 Jul 2023
    Nebula: Is super easy to get running. It uses an interesting angle, working on the service and not just the device level. Unfortunately their NAT support seems to be still quite problematic and I am not going to maintain all those forwarded ports manually. There is a PR to support PCP but even if that ever gets applied I am not sure how well that will play with older routers. While it should be battle proven at slack, the community seems to be not that active. It still has the in-house tool that just got released.
  • Most efficient way to reliably get a message to every server in a network?
    2 projects | /r/AskProgramming | 6 Jul 2023
    The catch is that I want this to be reliable and fault tolerant, so if some of the game servers in the network go down, the remaining online servers should still always be able to receive broadcasts from any other online server. The servers can also be in multiple geographic locations and I am planning on using a mesh overlay network like Nebula to connect them. Essentially each pair of online servers will likely have a secure link between them that goes directly through the underlying network.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing dsnet and Nebula you can also consider the following projects:

Netmaker - Netmaker makes networks with WireGuard. Netmaker automates fast, secure, and distributed virtual networks.

ZeroTier - A Smart Ethernet Switch for Earth

wgctrl-go - Package wgctrl enables control of WireGuard interfaces on multiple platforms.

cjdns - An encrypted IPv6 network using public-key cryptography for address allocation and a distributed hash table for routing.

tailscale - The easiest, most secure way to use WireGuard and 2FA.

kilo - Kilo is a multi-cloud network overlay built on WireGuard and designed for Kubernetes (k8s + wg = kg)

tinc - a VPN daemon

ansible-role-wireguard - Ansible role for installing WireGuard VPN. Supports Ubuntu, Debian, Archlinx, Fedora and CentOS.

headscale - An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server

netbird - Connect your devices into a single secure private WireGuard®-based mesh network with SSO/MFA and simple access controls.

yggdrasil-go - An experiment in scalable routing as an encrypted IPv6 overlay network