Tor is being used equally by journalists, law enforcement, governments, human rights activists, business leaders, militaries, abuse victims and average citizens concerned about online privacy. This diversity actually provides stronger anonymity to everyone as it makes it more difficult to identify or target a specific profile of Tor user. Anonymity loves company.
Tor has partnered with leading research institutions, and has been subjected to intensive academic research. It is the anonymity network which benefits from the most auditing and peer review.
Tor has been received awards by institutions such as the [Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://www.eff.org/awards/pioneer/2012), and the [Free Software Foundation](https://www.fsf.org/news/2010-free-software-awards-announced) to name a few.
An extract of a Top Secret appraisal by the NSA characterized Tor as "[the King of high secure, low latency Internet anonymity](http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/tor-high-secure-internet-anonymity)" with "no contenders for the throne in waiting".
Tailsis a complete operating system which uses Tor as its default networking application. The Tor Project recommends the usage of Tails for the use cases that are not covered by its own projects (for example the <span class="application">Tor Browser</span>).
But many people use Tor outside of Tails, and many people use Tails to do other things than accessing the Internet through Tor, for example to work offline on sensitive documents.