blixtThe non-technical peer
You keep blixt send; your client, producer, or parent gets a desktop app, a web UI, or a share link in a plain browser. No terminal required on their side.
Comparison
Blixt vs croc & magic-wormhole
These are brilliant tools. magic-wormhole made the code-phrase handoff a thing — a short human phrase, a PAKE handshake, done — and croc added resume and speed on top. Blixt keeps that simplicity and adds what happens when the other side doesn’t live in a terminal.
| croc / magic-wormhole | Blixt | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free and open source | Free plan; flat paid plans |
| Handoff | A short code phrase; PAKE makes the phrase itself authenticate the channel | A 12-word or short code (≥130-bit entropy), plus a 6-digit SAS you compare out of band |
| Interfaces | CLI only | Desktop GUI, local web UI, and CLI on one core |
| The other side | Needs a terminal and the tool installed | Can use the GUI, the web UI — or just a browser via a bCloud share link |
| Typical path | croc: commonly through a public relay; wormhole: direct when possible, else a transit relay | Direct QUIC via ICE first, direct HTTPS second; relay only as a last resort |
| Transport | TCP streams | QUIC + BBR with parallel streams; parallel-TCP HTTPS fallback |
| Resume after a drop | croc: yes. wormhole: no | Yes — missing chunks only, verified against a MAC-protected journal |
| Link aggregation | No | Multiconnect bonds NICs on direct transports (Basic plan and up) |
| Support | Community issue tracker | Priority support on the Max plan |
Credit where due
Where croc & magic-wormhole are the better choice
- Both ends are engineers in terminals. One small binary, no GUI baggage, already in your package manager — perfect between servers and between people who both live in a shell.
- The PAKE design is genuinely elegant. magic-wormhole’s protocol is well-studied, and the idea that the code phrase is the authentication has aged beautifully.
- Minimal trust surface. A single open-source tool you can read end to end, with no accounts and no billing relationship.
And they’re free and open source.Both codebases are public and widely reviewed; Blixt’s code is not. If a terminal on both ends is a given, croc and wormhole are excellent and you may not need us.
The other direction
Where Blixt wins
Relay is the fallback, not the default
ICE/STUN hole punching goes for a direct QUIC path first, then direct HTTPS. Relays exist for hard NATs — our free relay is honestly capped at 1 MiB/s, because the point is to get you direct.
Speed work under the hood
Parallel QUIC streams plus Multiconnect can distribute chunks across selected Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and tethered-phone paths. Actual throughput depends on the paths and their shared bottlenecks.
For transfers with a deadline
A MAC-protected journal identifies missing verified blocks, BLAKE3 checks every chunk, and the Max plan includes priority support when a transfer is on the critical path.