Since Waku is built on top of libp2p, they share a lot of concepts and terminologies between them. However, there are key differences between them that are worth noting.
Waku intends to incentivise mechanisms to run nodes, but it is not part of libp2p's scope. Additionally, users or developers do not have to deploy their infrastructure as a prerequisite to use Waku. It is a service network. However, you are encouraged to [run a node](/run-node) to support and decentralise the network.
Waku includes various protocols covering the following domains: privacy preservation, censorship resistance, and platform agnosticism, allowing it to run on any platform or environment.
Waku provides out-of-the-box protocols to enable mostly offline/resource-limited devices, [Store](/learn/concepts/protocols#store)/[Light Push](/learn/concepts/protocols#light-push)/[Filter](/learn/concepts/protocols#filter) caters to those use cases.
libp2p does not have strong spam protection guarantees, [RLN Relay](/learn/concepts/protocols#rln-relay) is a protocol being developed by the Waku team towards this goal.
