Nebula
A scalable overlay networking tool with a focus on performance, simplicity and security (by slackhq)
headscale
An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server (by juanfont)
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| Nebula | headscale | |
|---|---|---|
| 140 | 221 | |
| 13,689 | 19,446 | |
| 1.8% | - | |
| 8.7 | 9.2 | |
| 4 days ago | about 10 hours ago | |
| Go | Go | |
| MIT License | BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" 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.
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.
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.
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JIT WireGuard
(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
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Ask HN: What Underrated Open Source Project Deserves More Recognition?
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.
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Nebula is Not the Fastest Mesh VPN (But neither are any of the others)
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
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Nebula is an open-source and free-to-use modern C++ game engine
That's not at all confusing with Slack's Nebula. https://github.com/slackhq/nebula
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A word of caution about Tailscale
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
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Free Tech Tools and Resources - Multi-clock Display, Networking Tools, Digital Forensics & More
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.
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Would we still create Nebula today?
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:
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Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
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.
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Which overlay network?
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.
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Most efficient way to reliably get a message to every server in a network?
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.
headscale
Posts with mentions or reviews of headscale.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-04.
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Building a Managed Service Provider Business With Open Source
Headscale
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Russia has started indiscriminately blocking all OpenVPN/WireGuard connections
You can always use headscale. https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
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Securely Accessing Private AWS Resources from GitHub Actions with TailScale
One more thing, you can host Tailscale Control Server yourself if you want, which is a plus.
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A word of caution about Tailscale
https://github.com/juanfont/headscale not to mention but Tailscale has a very good culture, I’m sure they would give notice if they pull the rug. There are also many alternatives such as Zerotier and more are showing up every day and open source options.
- Is HTTPS necessary?
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Connecting several hundreds IoT (raspberry pi's) devices with a VPN
How about self-hosted Tailscale, known as Headscale
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Tailscale Kubernetes Operator
Would be nice if https://github.com/juanfont/headscale can be managed by the Tailscale operator.
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Mullvad on Tailscale: Privately browse the web
You can run your own "head scale" control server and use their clients with it: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
Requires a lot more setup, but it is an option. I've been self-hosting headscale for some time and it is quite stable.
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Netbirdio/netbird: Connect devices into a single private WireGuard mesh network
There's an alternative to tailscale service called headscale https://github.com/juanfont/headscale (CLI only server compatible with official tailscale clients)
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NetMaker: Connect Everything with a WireGuard VPN
It isn't official, but headscale exists: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
What are some alternatives?
When comparing Nebula and headscale you can also consider the following projects:
ZeroTier - A Smart Ethernet Switch for Earth
tailscale - The easiest, most secure way to use WireGuard and 2FA.
Netmaker - Netmaker makes networks with WireGuard. Netmaker automates fast, secure, and distributed virtual networks.
zero-ui - ZeroUI - ZeroTier Controller Web UI - is a web user interface for a self-hosted ZeroTier network controller.
tinc - a VPN daemon
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
firezone - Open-source VPN server and egress firewall for Linux built on WireGuard. Firezone is easy to set up (all dependencies are bundled thanks to Chef Omnibus), secure, performant, and self hostable.