OnionShare VS session-desktop

Compare OnionShare vs session-desktop and see what are their differences.

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OnionShare session-desktop
130 301
5,991 1,384
1.4% 2.6%
9.5 0.0
4 days ago about 7 hours ago
Python TypeScript
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 only
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.

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 2024-03-12.
  • A Beginner's Guide to Hosting a Dark Web Chat Interface
    2 projects | dev.to | 12 Mar 2024
    Open the Tor browser and navigate to the OnionShare website (https://onionshare.org/).
  • Ten years from Snowden revelations – what's next for Tor and privacy online?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2023
    Wasn't expecting to find something amazing from this blog post, but this project looks amazing! and has a few big partners behind it so I hope it does not vaporware https://onionshare.org/
  • Are there fully anonymous alternatives to Session/Telegram?
    2 projects | /r/privacy | 10 Jun 2023
    OnionShare (chat/file transfer feature)
  • What apps to synchronize share TEXT securely between Android / iOS / MacOS / Windows
    4 projects | /r/androidapps | 15 May 2023
    https://onionshare.org/ (not ready yet)
  • Overwriting your Windows partition
    2 projects | /r/linuxmemes | 9 May 2023
    Could you share the project file, pretty please? :D Maybe using OnionShare (https://onionshare.org/) or Firefox Send (https://github.com/timvisee/send-instances/)?
  • Most straight forward way to share a file with someone?
    3 projects | /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 | /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 | /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 | /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.)

session-desktop

Posts with mentions or reviews of session-desktop. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-29.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing OnionShare and session-desktop you can also consider the following projects:

Tox - The future of online communications.

qTox - qTox is a chat, voice, video, and file transfer IM client using the encrypted peer-to-peer Tox protocol.

jami-cli - Jami client for terminal

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

berty - Berty is a secure peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or without internet access, cellular data or trust in the network

droppy

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

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!

Signal-Desktop - A private messenger for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

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

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

ricochet - Anonymous peer-to-peer instant messaging