Zayo vs Nebula
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Zayo and Nebula.
Quick Verdict
3.3/5
Zayo
0 reviews
3.9/5
Nebula
0 reviews
Nebula is rated higher (3.9 vs 3.3). More than 240,000 route miles and 34 million fiber miles worldwide across North America, Europe and global reach (2026 figures) Nebula is an open source scalable overlay networking tool built by Slack engineers. Creates a flat network where distributed nodes communicate securely. Firewall rules in the protocol.
Zayo Fiber network and colocation carrier | Nebula Scalable overlay network built by Slack | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.3 (0 reviews) | 3.9 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | paid | free |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free |
| Best for | Enterprises, carriers and content operators buying dedicated transport capacity — dark fiber, 100G/400G wavelengths, private networks and colocation cross-connects — across North America and Western Europe | Infrastructure engineers building a large self-hosted mesh across clouds and colos who want identity-based networking with no SaaS dependency and can run a certificate authority safely. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ✓ | |
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ✓ | |
| Tags | ||
| Tags | eu datacenterus datacenterprivate networking | free tieropen sourceself hostable |
| Visit Zayo → | Visit Nebula → | |
Zayo
Pros
- + Tier-1 backbone: 240,000+ route miles, 11+ unique North American long-haul routes and genuine path diversity
- + Specific published SLAs (99.9% unprotected, 99.95% protected; 100% CloudLink guarantee) rather than marketing uptime claims
- + Real network-based DDoS mitigation (50 Tb+ capacity) with 24/7 NOC and SOC operations
- + Deep transport portfolio — dark fiber, 400G/800G wavelengths, Ethernet, IP transit, colocation — under one contract
Cons
- - No public pricing and no self-serve anything: quote-based, multi-year, engineer-installed
- - Procurement and install timelines are long; not viable for small or urgent deployments
- - APAC presence is subsea reach and partner interconnect, not owned metro fiber
- - Carrier-grade support experience is inconsistent in public enterprise forums; negotiate escalation terms
Nebula
Pros
- + Free and open source; no vendor sits on your data path
- + Proven at scale — Slack's overlay runs on 50,000+ documented production hosts
- + Modern, non-homegrown crypto: Noise Protocol Framework, Curve25519/P256, AES-256-GCM
- + Certificate-based identity with groups-style firewall rules enforced between peers
- + Direct peer-to-peer tunnels with NAT traversal; lighthouses handle discovery only
Cons
- - You run the PKI: CA key custody, one-year default CA lifetime, certificate signing per node
- - No GUI, no hosted control plane, no SSO in the open-source edition
- - Operationally steeper than WireGuard and much steeper than managed mesh products
- - Overlay IPv6 and mobile client polish lag the desktop experience
- - No support contract or SLA unless you buy the third-party managed offering
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