Shadowsocks

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

16180 stars · 6231 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Shadowsocks is a family of encrypted SOCKS5 proxy clients and servers for circumventing internet censorship, with implementations in C#, Rust, C/libev, Go, and more. The Windows client provides a system tray GUI with system proxy configuration, PAC rule modes, server auto-switching, and UDP relay support.

Use cases

• bypass internet censorship with an encrypted proxy
• route browser traffic through a socks5 proxy on windows
• split traffic so domestic sites connect directly and foreign sites use the proxy
• set up a lightweight proxy server on a linux vps or openwrt router
• automatically switch between proxy servers based on latency and packet loss

When to choose

• you need a fast, lightweight encrypted proxy to circumvent firewalls
• you want per-app or system-wide proxying with PAC-based routing rules
• you need clients across windows, android, linux, and embedded routers from one ecosystem

When to avoid

• you need a full VPN with tunnel-level encryption of all traffic rather than a SOCKS/HTTP proxy
• you want a zero-configuration tool - shadowsocks requires your own server and keys
• you need official support or a permissive license - the licensing is nonstandard

Facets

application · maturity active

proxy vpn networking security privacy privacy censorship-circumvention networking security cross-platform windows cross-platform shadowsocks socks5-proxy censorship-circumvention encrypted-proxy pac udp-relay system-proxy server-switching android linux macos openwrt

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="shadowsocks/shadowsocks-libev")