Managed Nebula vs Cloudflare Tunnel

Managed Nebula and Cloudflare Tunnel take very different approaches to secure connectivity. Nebula creates a peer-to-peer mesh network where hosts communicate directly. Cloudflare Tunnel routes traffic through Cloudflare’s global network, acting as a reverse proxy for your services.

Nebula is a fully open-source overlay networking tool that we originally built at Slack and continue to maintain at Defined Networking. It uses its own protocol built on the Noise framework to create peer-to-peer encrypted tunnels between hosts. Managed Nebula is our cloud-hosted management layer that handles certificate authorities, host configuration, and distribution, while you retain full control of your network’s data plane.

Cloudflare Tunnel (formerly Argo Tunnel) creates outbound-only connections from your infrastructure to Cloudflare’s edge network. Remote users access your services through Cloudflare’s proxy, authenticated via Cloudflare Access (their zero-trust platform).

Below, we break down the key differences to help you decide which is right for your network.

	Managed Nebula	Cloudflare Tunnel
Architecture	Peer-to-peer mesh	Proxy through Cloudflare edge
Traffic path	Direct host-to-host	Through Cloudflare’s network
Authentication	Certificate-based (Nebula CA)	Identity provider via Access
Firewall	Stateful with security groups	Cloudflare Access policies
Protocol	Nebula (Noise IX)	QUIC/HTTP2 to Cloudflare edge
Open source	Fully (MIT license)	Client open-source; edge closed
Data path	You control entirely	Cloudflare processes traffic
Free tier	Up to 100 hosts	Free with Cloudflare account
Pricing	$1/host/month	Free tunnels; Access is per-seat

These tools solve connectivity in fundamentally different ways.

Nebula creates a mesh network where hosts communicate directly with each other through encrypted peer-to-peer tunnels. Traffic between two hosts takes the most direct network path. Your data never passes through a third party’s infrastructure. The network is fully decentralized: if our control plane goes offline, your existing network continues operating normally.

Cloudflare Tunnel creates outbound connections from your servers to Cloudflare’s edge network. When a user accesses a service, their request goes to Cloudflare’s nearest edge location, through the tunnel to your origin server, and back. Cloudflare sits in the middle of every connection, which means your traffic passes through their infrastructure. This is by design: Cloudflare provides DDoS protection, WAF, and caching at the edge.

Nebula has a stateful packet firewall built directly into the Nebula process. Firewall rules reference groups embedded in certificates, working similarly to AWS Security Groups. Access control is distributed and enforced on every host, not dependent on a central service.

Cloudflare Access provides identity-aware access control through Cloudflare’s edge. Policies are defined in the Cloudflare dashboard and enforce authentication via identity providers (Okta, Google, Azure AD, etc.) before allowing access to tunneled services. This is a zero-trust model where Cloudflare’s edge is the policy enforcement point.

With Managed Nebula, you run your own lighthouses and relays on infrastructure you control. Your network’s data plane is entirely yours. Traffic between hosts never leaves your control. We handle the certificate authority and configuration distribution, but your operational network does not depend on us.

With Cloudflare Tunnel, all traffic passes through Cloudflare’s global network. Cloudflare can see request metadata and, depending on your configuration, may terminate TLS and inspect traffic for WAF and caching purposes. You are dependent on Cloudflare’s infrastructure for connectivity. If Cloudflare experiences an outage, your tunneled services become unreachable.

Nebula is fully open-source under the MIT license. Every component is available for inspection, modification, and self-hosting. You can run a complete Nebula network with zero dependency on us.

Cloudflare Tunnel’s client (cloudflared) is open-source, but the edge network, Access platform, and all traffic processing infrastructure are proprietary. There is no way to self-host the Cloudflare edge.

Managed Nebula offers simple per-host pricing:

• Free: Up to 100 hosts, 2 routes, SSO, and a simple management UI. No credit card required.
• Pro: $1/host/month with unlimited hosts, up to 100 routes, priority support, and guaranteed uptime
• Enterprise: Custom pricing with a dedicated Slack support channel and network design assistance

See our pricing page for full details, or contact sales for Enterprise.

Cloudflare Tunnel is free to create, but Cloudflare Access (the zero-trust authentication layer) is priced per seat on paid plans. Additional Cloudflare services (WAF, DDoS protection, etc.) have their own pricing.

Choose Managed Nebula if you want:

• Direct host-to-host connectivity with no third party in the data path
• Full control over your network infrastructure and traffic routing
• A fully open-source foundation with no proprietary dependencies
• Certificate-based authentication with group-based firewall rules
• A network that keeps working even if the management plane goes down

Choose Cloudflare Tunnel if you want:

• DDoS protection and WAF at the edge for public-facing services
• Identity provider-based zero-trust access for web applications
• Cloudflare’s global network for caching and performance optimization
• Outbound-only connections that don’t require opening inbound ports