Nebula vs rathole
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted remote access & vpn options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Nebula
Scalable overlay networking tool from Slack
VS
rathole
Lightweight and high-performance reverse proxy for NAT traversal
| Feature | Nebula | rathole |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Remote Access & VPN | Remote Access & VPN |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Language | Go | Rust |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Medium |
| Min. RAM | 64 MB | 64 MB |
| Deployment | binary, bare-metal | binary, docker |
| GitHub stars | ★ 17,591 | ★ 13,999 |
| First released | 2019 | 2021 |
| Replaces | Tailscale | ngrok, frp |
Why pick each one
Choose Nebula if…
- Released under the MIT license
- Mature project with 17.6k GitHub stars
- Written in Go
- Tiny footprint — runs in 64 MB RAM
Choose rathole if…
- Released under the Apache-2.0 license
- First-class Docker support for quick deployment
- Mature project with 14k GitHub stars
- Written in Rust
Frequently asked questions
Is Nebula or rathole better?
Neither is universally better. Nebula has the larger community, while rathole is simpler to set up (medium difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Nebula and rathole free and open-source?
Yes. Nebula is licensed under MIT and rathole under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Nebula and rathole with Docker?
Nebula: check the project docs for container support. rathole: yes.