Zebra is a routing daemon. That means, it will send routing requests and receive similar requests from neighbor routers, and eventually update your routing tables accordingly. Zebra provides TCP/IP based routing services with routing protocols support such as RIPv1, RIPv2, RIPng, OSPFv2, OSPFv3, BGP-4, and BGP-4+.

RIP and OSPF are "internal" routing protocols, whereas BGP is an "external" routing protocol. Internal protocols are designed for use in LANs, within a global administrative scope. External protocols are designed for use in WAN, and BGP is specifically designed for Internet use. Zebra also supports special BGP Route Reflector and Route Server behavior. In addition to traditional IPv4 routing protocols, Zebra also supports IPv6 routing protocols.

There are five routing daemons in use, and there is one manager daemon. These daemons may be located on separate machines from the manager daemon.

The routing daemons are:

The manager daemon is: