Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

iftop VS iperf

Compare iftop VS iperf and see what are their differences

iftop logo iftop

iftop does for network usage what top(1) does for CPU usage.

iperf logo iperf

A TCP, UDP, and SCTP network bandwidth measurement tool
  • iftop Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-08-25
  • iperf Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-17

iftop videos

How to monitor network bandwidth using Iftop

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to install iftop and use it on Linux Mint 18.3
  • Review - Untangle Traffic monitoring with Iftop

iperf videos

Using Iperf to measure network speed / bandwidth

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to use iperf to test local network LAN speed in Windows 10
  • Review - [HOWTO] Test My Network Speed?! [iPerf & JPerf]

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to iftop and iperf)
Monitoring Tools
38 38%
62% 62
Performance Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0
Log Management
0 0%
100% 100
Command Line Tools
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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

Based on our record, iperf seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 4 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.

iftop mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of iftop yet. Tracking of iftop recommendations started around Mar 2021.

iperf mentions (4)

  • Microsoft: Don't Use Iperf3 on Windows
    Just some clarification: IPerf 2 is different from the iperf3 found at https://github.com/esnet/iperf. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • Yet Another Bench Script (YABS): evaluate Linux server performance with this simple Bash script and utility
    Network - network throughput (both incoming and outgoing) is tested using iperf3 on several geographically diverse public iperf servers. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Speed testing Visible with a modem
    File transfer using iperf3 over Tailscale. I noticed that the bandwidth to my home computer (on a 500/500 fiber connection) was higher than with speedtest.net. For the first few days I was getting downloads and uploads of 28Mbps (+/- std dev of 6Mbps) and 150ms latency (+/- 35ms). After somewhere around 100GB total transfer (maybe half of that over Tailscale), it is now downloading and uploading at 10Mbps (+/-... Source: about 2 years ago
  • FTP upload speed isn't great
    I can add to this. I have two mini self contained projects to create multiarch static bins of mtr and iperf3 for general usage. Source: almost 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing iftop and iperf, you can also consider the following products

nmon - This systems administrator, tuner, benchmark tool gives you a huge amount of important performance...

JPerf - This project gives a better UI and new functionalities to the initial JPerf 1.

gtop - System monitoring dashboard for terminal

mtr - mtr combines the functionality of the 'traceroute' and 'ping' programs in a single...

psutil - psutil is a module providing an interface for retrieving information on all running processes and...

Wireshark - Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows. It lets you capture and interactively browse the traffic running on a computer network.