Mix Networks
-
Tor provides robust anonymity, allowing you to defend against surveillance, circumvent censorship and reduce tracking. It blocks trackers, resists fingerprinting and implements multi-layered encryption by default, meaning you can browse freely. Tor also allows access to OnionLand: hidden services.
-
I2P offers great generic transports, it is well geared towards accessing hidden services, and has a couple of technical benefits over Tor: P2P friendly with unidirectional short-lived tunnels, it is packet-switched (instead of circuit-switched) with TCP and UDP, and continuously profiles peers, in order to select the best performing ones. I2P is less mature, but fully-distributed and self-organising, its smaller size means that it hasn't yet been blocked or DOSed much.
-
Freenet is easy to setup, provides excellent friend To Friend Sharing vs I2P, and is great for publishing content anonymously. It's quite large in size, and very slow so not the best choice for casual browsing.
Objective of this page
Find the best free, open source, E2E encrypted and private alternative to now.
Compare Tor vs I2P vs Freenet vs
Discover the best Mix Networks tools for Android, iPhone, Linux, PC and Chrome to download now. And choose secure, self-hosted, peer-to-peer and independant alternatives in 2024
Stop the invasion of privacy from big tech, improve data security stay safe.
Notable Mentions
Notes
Tor, I2P and Freenet are all anonymity networks - but they work very differently and each is good for specific purposes. So a good and viable solution would be to use all of them, for different tasks. You can read more about how I2P compares to Tor, here
Word of Warning
To provide low-latency browsing, Tor does not mix packets or generate cover traffic. If an adversary is powerful enough, theoretically they could either observe the entire network, or just the victims entry and exit nodes. It's worth mentioning, that even though your ISP can not see what you are doing, they will be able determine that you are using a mix net, to hide this - a VPN could be used as well. If you are doing anything which could put you at risk, then good OpSec is essential, as the authorities have traced criminals through the Tor network before, and made arrests. Don't let Tor provide you a false sense of security - be aware of information leaks through DNS, other programs or human error. Tor-supported browsers may might lag behind their upstream forks, and include exploitable unpatched issues. See #19
Note: The Tor network is run by the community. If you benefit from using it and would like to help sustain uncensored internet access for all, consider running a Tor relay
Submit New Entry
Are we missing anything? You can help us improve this page, by submitting a new entry