List of the Top 9 Network Discovery Tools for Mac in 2025

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Effortlessly identify all devices connected to your network with Auvik. With its ongoing discovery and automated mapping features, you can maintain an accurate and current inventory of your infrastructure, which is essential for efficient management and security. Auvik equips you with the necessary tools to reveal overlooked devices, monitor changes, and sustain a comprehensive and precise perspective of your network.

FirstWave’s NMIS acts as a robust network management system, encompassing fault detection, performance monitoring, configuration oversight, performance visualizations, and alerts based on specific thresholds. It employs business rules that facilitate tailored notification policies, compatible with various notification methods. Additionally, FirstWave empowers its partners, which include some of the largest telecommunications companies and managed service providers worldwide, to safeguard their clientele against cyber threats, all while swiftly expanding their cybersecurity service revenues on a significant scale. Overall, FirstWave delivers a thorough and integrated solution for network discovery, management, and cybersecurity, catering to its global partners. This holistic approach ensures that partners can effectively combat evolving cyber threats while managing their networks efficiently.

The SoftPerfect Network Scanner is a highly efficient and adaptable tool suitable for scanning both IPv4 and IPv6 networks, significantly improving various network management tasks. Its user-friendly interface, together with its lightweight and portable design, provides an extensive array of features and advanced capabilities that cater to professionals, occasional network administrators, and everyday users focused on computer security. This scanner enables users to ping devices, perform port scans, discover shared folders, and collect comprehensive information on network devices using various protocols such as WMI, SNMP, HTTP, SSH, and PowerShell. Furthermore, it can assess remote services, registries, files, and performance counters, offering customizable filtering and display settings for an enhanced user experience. Users also have the advantage of easily exporting their NetScan results in multiple formats, including XML, JSON, and more, facilitating straightforward data management and analysis. In addition to its robust functionalities, the tool’s versatility ensures it remains an essential resource for anyone involved in network administration or security assessments, making it a preferred choice for both simple and complex networking environments.

The Nmap project seeks to overturn the common belief that open-source software is often inadequately documented by providing a wealth of resources detailing the installation and effective use of Nmap. This resource hub links to the official documentation from Insecure.Org, in addition to essential insights from various contributors. The book Nmap Network Scanning stands out as the ultimate guide for the Nmap Security Scanner, a free tool widely adopted for tasks including network discovery, management, and security evaluations. It addresses a diverse audience, ranging from newcomers grasping the basics of port scanning to experienced hackers delving into sophisticated packet crafting techniques. Featuring a detailed 42-page reference section that thoroughly explains each feature and option in Nmap, the book also demonstrates how to apply these tools to solve practical problems effectively. Additionally, it provides illustrative examples and diagrams showcasing the actual data transmitted across the network, which significantly aids readers in grasping real-world applications. This all-encompassing strategy guarantees that both beginners and seasoned professionals can extract valuable insights from the content offered. Ultimately, Nmap's commitment to quality documentation is a testament to its importance in the open-source community.

Scapy is a sophisticated tool designed for interactive packet manipulation, allowing users to create and interpret packets from a wide array of protocols. It proficiently handles tasks such as data transmission, capturing, and correlating requests with responses, in addition to a variety of other capabilities. This multifaceted program can carry out traditional functions like scanning, tracerouting, probing, unit testing, executing attacks, and network discovery, effectively replacing several other tools such as hping, parts of nmap, arpspoof, arp-sk, arping, tcpdump, tshark, and p0f. Moreover, Scapy excels in executing specialized tasks that can be challenging for other utilities, including sending invalid frames and injecting custom 802.11 frames, as well as implementing techniques like VLAN hopping alongside ARP cache poisoning or VOIP decoding on WEP-encrypted channels. It operates across multiple operating systems, including Linux, Windows, OSX, and most Unix variants that support libpcap, making it broadly accessible. Notably, the same codebase accommodates both Python 2 and Python 3, underscoring its adaptability to different programming environments. Development of Scapy is facilitated through the Git version control system, with its main repository hosted on GitHub, which encourages collaborative contributions and regular updates. Consequently, users are provided with ongoing enhancements that align with the rapidly changing field of network security and analysis, ensuring that Scapy remains a valuable resource for both novices and experts alike. The community-driven approach to development fosters a sense of shared ownership and innovation among its users.

GroundWork Monitor Enterprise serves as a comprehensive IT monitoring solution capable of overseeing physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures alike. It ensures that every facet of your IT environment is under surveillance, providing a seamless experience regardless of the specific setup you have in place. This enterprise-level monitoring tool effectively integrates cloud-scale and on-premise analytics, allowing for a unified approach to data management. With GroundWork, users can gather and scrutinize all operational and performance metrics from a single platform, enhancing visibility across the entire application stack. The software facilitates flexible and customizable workflows coupled with robust integrations, making it an essential resource for IT departments. Acting as the central hub for collecting IT monitoring data, GroundWork excels in status alerting and application health monitoring. Additionally, it automates the deployment of monitoring capabilities and swiftly detects network-related issues. Thanks to its API-based monitoring agents, real-time data collection becomes a reality, ensuring that information is always current and actionable. Furthermore, GroundWork simplifies processes by minimizing the need for manual intervention through automated network discovery and device registration, ultimately streamlining IT operations. This effectiveness empowers organizations to maintain optimal performance and quickly respond to potential challenges.

Intermapper's network monitoring solution offers the capability to create an extensive network map that provides a real-time view of the status of your network. It employs color-coded indicators that effectively display which components are functioning smoothly and which ones are facing difficulties. With a wide variety of map layouts and icon designs available, you can accurately illustrate your unique IT environment. In case of any disruptions, Intermapper sends out instant alerts via text, email, sound notifications, and other communication methods, enabling you to resolve technological issues before they impact users or customers. You can pinpoint problems in your distributed network in seconds, significantly reducing the time spent on troubleshooting. This streamlined approach not only saves time but also alleviates frustration for both you and your IT staff, ensuring that customer satisfaction remains a top priority. The software facilitates the automatic detection and documentation of all IP-enabled devices on your network within minutes. Moreover, you can customize the aesthetics of your map with a diverse array of icons and background designs. Additionally, you can develop hierarchical maps and sub-maps to emphasize particular network areas, such as different floors in a building, classrooms, or equipment closets, which further improves your network visualization. By leveraging these features, you can maintain a more comprehensive understanding of your IT infrastructure and respond proactively to potential concerns, ultimately reinforcing the reliability of your network services. This proactive management is crucial in today's fast-paced technological landscape, where quick responses can lead to significant advantages.

Cisco Network Assistant presents an intuitive interface and a task-focused menu that simplifies the management of both wired and wireless networks, accommodating up to 80 devices. This free tool is crafted to ease the deployment of standard services across a range of Cisco equipment, including switches, routers, wireless controllers, and access points. Users benefit from immediate access to essential product details, such as warranty information, contract statuses, advisories, and end-of-life alerts, all through a seamless connection with Cisco Active Advisor, which gathers data from devices overseen by the Network Assistant. The software equips network administrators with a detailed overview of their infrastructure, enabling effective use of its capabilities for small to midsize businesses or branch offices. Moreover, it facilitates network discovery while visually depicting the network topology, in addition to allowing configuration management of Cisco products specifically designed for small and medium enterprises. This comprehensive approach ensures that administrators can efficiently monitor, maintain, and optimize their network systems, leading to improved operational control and performance. Ultimately, Cisco Network Assistant serves as an invaluable resource for enhancing network management practices within various organizational contexts.