What is Nebula used for?

Nebula is an open-source overlay networking tool that connects computers anywhere using peer-to-peer, certificate-based encrypted tunnels. It is a good fit for connecting servers across several cloud providers, and securing traffic between data centers and endpoints.

Is Nebula open source?

Yes. Nebula is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at slackhq/nebula and is written mainly in Go.

Yes. Nebula is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Nebula?

Yes. Nebula can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.

What is Nebula an alternative to?

Nebula is an open-source alternative to Tailscale and Twingate. Other open-source alternatives to Tailscale include NetBird, ZeroTier and Netmaker.

Is Nebula actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Nebula was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.11.2, published on 22 September 2026. The project has 18k stars on GitHub.

Nebula: open-source alternative to Tailscale, Twingate

About Nebula

Nebula is an overlay networking tool, created at Slack, that connects computers anywhere in the world into one private network. It is designed around performance, simplicity and security, and it can link a handful of machines or scale up to tens of thousands. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows and FreeBSD, with iOS and Android versions available as source code.

Technically, Nebula is a mutually authenticated peer-to-peer software-defined network based on the Noise Protocol Framework. Certificates assert each node's IP address, name and membership in user-defined groups, and those groups allow traffic filtering between nodes regardless of cloud provider. Discovery nodes called lighthouses help peers find each other, with optional UDP hole punching to connect through most firewalls and NATs.

Because addressing does not depend on where machines run, data can move between nodes across different cloud providers, data centers and endpoints without a fixed addressing scheme. Nebula fills a role similar to a mesh VPN. It is written in Go, released under the MIT license and can be self-hosted, with packages available for several Linux distributions, Homebrew and Docker.

Key features

Mutually authenticated peer-to-peer tunnels
Certificate-based identity and group membership
Group-based firewall rules between nodes
Lighthouse discovery with UDP hole punching
Runs on Linux, macOS, Windows and FreeBSD
Scales from a few hosts to thousands

Good fit for

→Connecting servers across several cloud providers
→Securing traffic between data centers and endpoints

Built with: Go
Tags: overlay-network; vpn; mesh-network; peer-to-peer; encryption; networking; golang; security

Nebula: questions and answers

What is Nebula used for?: Nebula is an open-source overlay networking tool that connects computers anywhere using peer-to-peer, certificate-based encrypted tunnels. It is a good fit for connecting servers across several cloud providers, and securing traffic between data centers and endpoints.
Is Nebula open source?: Yes. Nebula is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at slackhq/nebula and is written mainly in Go.
Is Nebula free?: Yes. Nebula is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Nebula?: Yes. Nebula can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
What is Nebula an alternative to?: Nebula is an open-source alternative to Tailscale and Twingate. Other open-source alternatives to Tailscale include NetBird, ZeroTier and Netmaker.
Is Nebula actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Nebula was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.11.2, published on 22 September 2026. The project has 18k stars on GitHub.