As a member of Xenes family, germanene has excellent nonlinear saturable absorption characteristics. In this work, we prepared germanene nanosheets by liquid phase exfoliation and measured their saturation intensity as 0.6 GW/cm2with a modulation depth of 8%. Then, conventional solitons with a pulse width of 946 fs and high-energy noise-like pulses with a pulse width of 784 fs were obtained by using germanene nanosheet as a saturable absorber for a mode-locked Erbium-doped fiber laser. The characteristics of the two types of pulses were investigated experimentally. The results reveal that germanene has great potential for modulation devices in ultrafast lasers and can be used as a material for creation of excellent nonlinear optical devices to explore richer applications in ultrafast photonics.Graphical Abstract