Software Alternatives & Reviews

iftop VS vnStat

Compare iftop VS vnStat and see what are their differences

iftop logo iftop

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

vnStat logo vnStat

vnStat is a console-based network traffic monitor for Linux and BSD that keeps a log of network...
  • iftop Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-08-25
  • vnStat Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-04-16

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

vnStat videos

HowTo: Monitor and Log Network Traffic on Linux / Unix Using vnStat

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to Setup vnStat Network Traffic Monitor on Linux
  • Tutorial - How To Install And Use VNSTAT On A Raspberry Pi

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to iftop and vnStat)
Monitoring Tools
66 66%
34% 34
Performance Monitoring
58 58%
42% 42
Command Line Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Log Management
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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

Based on our record, vnStat 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.

vnStat mentions (4)

  • vnstatd refuses to start | SG-3100 w/23.01
    For more information about vnStat use "man vnstat" or visit: Http://humdi.net/vnstat/. Source: about 1 year ago
  • How to easily gather IPv6 VS IPv4 usage on a web server?
    Something similar to vnstat (which monitor the bandwidth usage): https://humdi.net/vnstat/. This tool doesn't necessarily take into account only the ports 80 and 443, it can be generalized to all the traffic flow, but that would be a great if it does. Source: about 1 year ago
  • How to show/record total traffic consumption per interface/vlan?
    Take a look at https://humdi.net/vnstat/ - it should work on *BSD and I think there's a package for pfSense (and by extension should be there for OPNSense as well). Otherwise it's not too hard to setup to run at start up as well. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Bandwidth monitoring?
    If you don't want to run a stack can try something simple and lightweight like vnstat (https://humdi.net/vnstat/). Source: almost 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

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

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

ntop - ntopng High-Speed Web-based Traffic Analysis and Flow Collection ntopng is the next generation version of the original ntop, a network traffic probe that monitors network usage. ntopng is based on …

gtop - System monitoring dashboard for terminal

nload - Monitor network traffic and bandwidth usage in real time

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

darkstat - darkstat is a packet sniffer which runs as a background process, captures network traffic...