Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

RANCID VS NetDisco

Compare RANCID VS NetDisco and see what are their differences

RANCID logo RANCID

RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ.

NetDisco logo NetDisco

Netdisco is an Open Source web-based network management tool first released publically in 2003.
  • RANCID Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-04-08
  • NetDisco Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-27

RANCID videos

Puppet Perspectives - Rancid "Troublemaker" Album Review (feat. Dan)

More videos:

  • Review - Rancid Life Won't Wait Album Review
  • Review - Review: Rancid “Trouble Maker”

NetDisco videos

Network Discovery With netdiscover - Discover Internal IP Addresses

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to RANCID and NetDisco)
Network Automation
47 47%
53% 53
Configuration Auditing
57 57%
43% 43
Change Management
64 64%
36% 36
Product Deployment
42 42%
58% 58

User comments

Share your experience with using RANCID and NetDisco. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, NetDisco should be more popular than RANCID. It has been mentiond 16 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

RANCID mentions (9)

  • Cisco switch backup/restore?
    A decade ago I worked for a shop that needed to routinely back up 100+ cisco switches and routers and refused to pay for solarwinds. I setup a light weight freebsd vm to run this open source software: https://shrubbery.net/rancid/ (Rancid: Really Awesome New Cisco config Differ) and set it to scrape all the equipment every 12 errors. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Version control for network configs
    Anyways Rancid does support cvs, svn, and git. Though I have only used it with cvs. Basically what it does, is checks out the configuration, downloads the configuration with other information about the state of the device, commits the configurations(which only changed ones will be in the latest check-ins, and then it can send an email of the changes. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Management Software for Cisco Devices?
    RANCID - Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ monitors a router's (or more generally a device's) configuration, including software and hardware (cards, serial numbers, etc) and uses CVS (Concurrent Version System), Subversion or Git to maintain history of changes. Source: about 2 years ago
  • What all are you doing with Ansible?
    If you want to use this as an opportunity to learn Ansible, or you don't want to add another tool to the stack, this is a fine use case. Otherwise, I would consider using either RANCID or Oxidized for configuration backup. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Starting with python at 30
    Before I knew about RANCiD (https://shrubbery.net/rancid), I wrote my own Perl application to telnet into a Foundry Networks switch and TFTP its configuration to my computer so I could back it up. At a future employer, I rewrote another coworkers Perl application that collected SNMP values from devices and did stuff with it (forget what all I did then). Source: over 2 years ago
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NetDisco mentions (16)

  • Finding port assignments by mac address on HP switch
    If it's an ongoing task, perhaps http://netdisco.org/ would be useful for you? Source: about 1 year ago
  • Considering a network overhaul. Need advice on Fortinet/FortiSwitch/Aruba/etc.
    Currently the Arubas are managed by CLI/NetDisco. Its great, but NetDisco cant do much beyond identifying devices, and setting the untagged vlan - and I need to break out putty for anything else. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Who doesn't enjoy network programming/automation
    Netdisco does this. http://netdisco.org/. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Is there a paid or free tool/utility out there I can use to automate the creation of a decent network diagram?
    Http://netdisco.org/ can generate network maps. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Service to keep track of network devices
    On another job I’ve successfully used netdisco for this! Source: almost 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing RANCID and NetDisco, you can also consider the following products

Unimus - Unimus is a Network Automation and Configuration management (NCM) solution designed for fast deployment network-wide and ease of use. Unimus does not require learning any abstraction or templating languages, and does not require any coding skills.

Oxidized - configuration backup software (IOS, JunOS) - silly attempt at rancid

GenieACS - A fast and lightweight TR-069 Auto Configuration Server (ACS)

Kiwi CatTools - Kiwi CatTools is a network automation and configuration management software that manage configurations from the desktop for network devices.

SolarWinds Network Topology Mapper - Automatically plot your network in minutes with network mapping software

rConfig - rConfig is a free open source network device configuration management utility for network engineers...