The Tor onion network is free, open-source software that routes your internet traffic through a volunteer-run network of relays, and it’s the foundation everything else on this site builds on. Tor stands for The Onion Router.
Each relay only knows the previous and next hop in the chain, never the full path, which makes it much harder for anyone to link your identity to your online activity.
A “.onion” address is a website that only exists inside the Tor network. These are often called “onion services” or “hidden services.” Traffic to a .onion site stays encrypted and routed through Tor relays from end to end, which is why some organizations run an onion version of their site alongside their normal one.
Who actually uses Tor?
Journalists and whistleblowers who need to communicate without exposing their identity or location.
People living under censorship who need to reach independent news and information.
Privacy-conscious individuals who prefer not to have their browsing tracked by advertisers or their ISP.
Security researchers and everyday users who simply want stronger baseline privacy online.
It’s worth being clear about something: Tor and .onion addresses are neutral tools. The same technology that protects a journalist can also be used to host illegal marketplaces. On this site, we focus exclusively on documenting legitimate, well-known organizations that operate onion services for privacy or free-speech reasons, such as news outlets and digital rights groups. We do not list, link to, or promote marketplaces, and we don’t index the network at large.
If you decide to try Tor, download it only from the official Tor Project website, keep it updated, and avoid entering personal information on sites you don’t already trust from the regular web.
How the Onion Network Got Its Name
The onion network is named for the way it wraps your traffic in layers of encryption, one for each relay it passes through, similar to the layers of an onion. Each relay peels off exactly one layer, learns only where to send the traffic next, and passes along what’s left, still encrypted. By the time it reaches its destination, no single relay has seen both where the traffic started and where it ended up.
What the Onion Network Doesn’t Do
It’s worth being clear about the limits, too. The onion network protects the path your traffic takes, not what you type into a website once you’re there. Logging into a personal account, entering your name on a form, or downloading a file that phones home once opened all bypass the protection Tor provides, regardless of how well the network itself is working.
Getting Started
The easiest way to use the onion network is Tor Browser, a modified version of Firefox preconfigured to route all its traffic through Tor automatically. It’s available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android, and it’s the option we recommend for anyone just getting started rather than configuring Tor manually.
