Onion sites worth visiting: official addresses, and where each one comes from

The best onion sites to start with

The best dark web sites for a first session are the dull ones, because you already know what they should look like. If the onion version of a site you read every day loads and matches, Tor is working and you've learned what a real address looks like before you meet a fake one.

What makes these legit dark web sites is not a "verified" badge on a list. Each one belongs to an organisation with a public website, a name and staff, and that organisation publishes its own onion address. An onion you can't trace back to an operator like that is one to leave alone, however often it turns up on "best onion sites" lists.

News and journalism

Sending a tip: SecureDrop addresses

Email, social networks and search

DuckDuckGo searches the ordinary web. To search onion sites themselves, see our dark web search engines guide.

Privacy, digital rights and human rights

Software, operating systems and tools

Archives and government

How you know these onion addresses are real

An onion address can't be looked up the way a domain name can. There's no registry to ask. The only proof that an address belongs to the BBC is the BBC saying so somewhere you know is the BBC. So every row above points to that place, and the check works the same way whether we do it or you do.

The last column of each table names one of three sources. An Onion-Location header or tag on the operator's ordinary website is the strongest, and covers most rows: Tor Browser shows it as the ".onion available" pill, so you can confirm the address yourself in two clicks. A page on the operator's own site is next, which is how the BBC, ProPublica, EFF, the CIA and the newsrooms' tips pages publish theirs. The Tor Project's lists come last: onion.torproject.org for the project's own services, and its featured onion sites for Facebook, Reddit and Amnesty. The beginner's guide walks through using the pill on a first visit.

What doesn't count: a link list, a forum post, a search result, or another directory, including this one, if you can't trace the address back to the operator. Addresses do change, so before you lean on an old bookmark for something that matters, check it against the source in its row.

What a real v3 onion address looks like

A current onion address is 56 letters and numbers followed by ".onion". It's not a random string. Tor's specification builds it from the service's 32-byte public key, a two-byte checksum and a one-byte version number, all base32-encoded. Three things follow from that, and you can check them by eye:

• Only a to z and 2 to 7. Base32 uses no 0, 1, 8 or 9. An address with any of those digits is not a v3 onion address.
• It ends in "d" before ".onion". The version byte is 3 by default, and it lands in the last character, which always encodes as "d". Every address in the tables above ends that way.
• A typo won't connect. The checksum catches it. Tor says even a small mistake stops the browser from reaching the site. A different address passed off as the real one will connect, though, which is why the source matters more than the shape.

Some operators add www. in front, as the BBC, DW, The Guardian, Whonix, Kicksecure and Privacy Guides do. That's an ordinary subdomain and doesn't change the 56 characters.

A 16-character address is the old v2 format, and Tor says that type "no longer works on today's Tor network." A list still showing one hasn't been checked since 2021.

Why the BBC, the CIA and Facebook run dark web sites

Mostly for the people who can't reach them the normal way, or don't want to be seen doing it.

The BBC published its onion address in advice on reaching BBC News, dated 4 March 2022, next to the Psiphon app as another circumvention tool. The page notes the onion works only in Tor Browser or similar, such as Onion Browser on iPhones.

The CIA launched its onion in May 2019. Its public affairs director said: "Our global mission demands that individuals can access us securely from anywhere." In plain terms, people who want to contact an intelligence agency from a country that watches its citizens shouldn't have to do it from a traceable connection.

Facebook started in October 2014 for a technical reason. Its announcement explained that a Tor user appears to jump between countries from one moment to the next, which Facebook's security systems read as a hacked account, so Tor users kept hitting extra checks. The onion gives them a direct, end-to-end encrypted path into Facebook's datacentres.

ProPublica wanted readers of its databases to leave less of a trail. Its 2016 post says "Our readers should never need to worry that somebody else is watching what they're doing on our site", and that it first tried the idea after publishing an app about online censorship in China. EFF added onions in April 2023 because it had seen signs that some of its resources were being censored. Proton has run an onion since 2017, and since 2022 you can create an account on it.

Can you use Facebook on Tor?

Yes, and the onion is the better way to do it, because it's built for Tor users and doesn't trip the location checks the ordinary site does. Be clear about what it hides, though. It keeps your location and IP address from Facebook and keeps your ISP from seeing that you use Facebook. It doesn't make you anonymous to Facebook once you log in, because signing in tells a site who you are no matter how you connected. People use it to reach Facebook where it's blocked, or to keep their location private, not to hide their identity.

How to send a tip to a newspaper anonymously

Use the newsroom's SecureDrop, the onion-based submission system in the second table. It was originally written by the late Aaron Swartz and is now managed by Freedom of the Press Foundation. Newsrooms install it so that sources don't have to trust email. The steps, in the order the systems' own guides give them:

1. Pick where you connect from before anything else. SecureDrop's source guide says not to use your employer's network or hardware, or your home internet. The New York Times recommends a public Wi-Fi network and a computer free of malware. If the computer is compromised, so is the submission.
2. Get the address from the newsroom and check it against the directory. The guide says to compare the SecureDrop Directory entry with the address on the organisation's own landing page, and not to submit if they differ. Some newsrooms' tips pages also give a short name that Tor Browser accepts in place of the long address.
3. Open it in Tor Browser only. Each SecureDrop can only be reached through Tor Browser. The Guardian adds a warning not to jump straight from its information page to its SecureDrop site if your browsing might be recorded.
4. Write down the codename and keep it secret. SecureDrop gives you a unique codename, and you need it to log back in and read replies. Lose it and you can't continue the conversation.

On the newsroom's side, the Guardian decrypts submissions on a device isolated from both the internet and its internal networks. If being identified as the source would put you in real danger, the Times suggests Tails instead of Tor Browser, and our guide to getting on the dark web explains when that step is worth it.

Onion sites that have shut down or changed address

The biggest change was the end of v2. The Tor Project announced in July 2020 that v2 was "fragile and at this point in time, unsafe", and set the timetable. Warnings started on 15 September 2020, the code was removed in Tor 0.4.6 on 15 July 2021, and from 15 October 2021 stable clients stopped connecting to v2 addresses. Every 16-character address stopped working, including Facebook's original 2014 one. The address in the table above is its v3 replacement.

Changes since then have been quieter, and they're where copied lists go wrong. When we compared one of the top-ranking "official onion sites" lists, TorWiki's, marked as updated in May 2026, against the operators' own sources:

• Tor Project: the list's address doesn't match the one on onion.torproject.org. The two share their first 13 characters and then diverge, which is a good illustration of why a matching start proves nothing.
• Internet Archive: the list's address doesn't match the one in archive.org's own Onion-Location header or on the Tor Project's featured list.
• The New York Times: the list still gives a main-site onion. The Times' own tips page publishes only its SecureDrop address, and nytimes.com sent no Onion-Location header when we checked. We don't list a main-site Times onion.

Some changes go the other way. The Guardian's main site now advertises its onion address in its own Onion-Location header, so that one can be checked the easy way: open theguardian.com in Tor Browser and click ".onion available".

Are Hidden Wiki and link-list sites safe to use?

Safe to look at, useless as a source. A link list is a page of addresses anyone can copy, edit or fake. Nothing on it tells you where an address came from. The popular ones mix real services with phishing copies of them and with markets, and a "hidden wiki" that looks authoritative is easy to clone, along with its links. Even carefully kept lists drift out of date, as the comparison above shows.

The operators in the tables above publish their own addresses and have no need of a link list. If a list points you at something, treat it as a lead. Go to the operator's own site and look for the address there. If you can't find one, don't use it. The dark web scams guide shows what the clones look like and how they take your money, and if you haven't set up Tor Browser yet, the beginner's guide starts there. What onion space is, and isn't, is in the dark web explainer.