Software Alternatives & Reviews

MASSCAN VS netcat

Compare MASSCAN VS netcat and see what are their differences

MASSCAN logo MASSCAN

This is the fastest Internet port scanner.

netcat logo netcat

Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections...
  • MASSCAN Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-11-04
  • netcat Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-11-19

MASSCAN videos

Tool Review - Masscan (Scan the whole internet)

More videos:

  • Review - SCANNING AT SCALE (masscan, nmap, axiom, recon.dev)

netcat videos

Linux Terminal 101: Netcat

More videos:

  • Review - Advanced Netcat and TCP Fun - Hak5 1922
  • Review - Netcat 101: Remote Shells in Windows, HakTip 86

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to MASSCAN and netcat)
Monitoring Tools
39 39%
61% 61
Security
60 60%
40% 40
Log Management
0 0%
100% 100
Network Scanning
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare MASSCAN and netcat

MASSCAN Reviews

15 Best Nmap Alternatives Network Security Scanner
Masscan has a capacity of as much as 1.6 million packets per second on its Linux version. That is not all, Masscan can scale up to a hundred million packets per second on a computer that is rigged with eight 10 Gpbs installed cards that run on PF RING driver.
Alternatives to Nmap: from simple to advanced network scanning
By default, Masscan’s scan rate is 100,000 packets-per-second. The macOS or Windows version of this tool can be set to 300,000 packets-per-second. On Linux, Masscan can do 1.6 million packets-per-second. But it can scan up to 100 million packets-per-second on a computer rigged with eight 10-Gbps network cards installed in it and running the PF_RING driver.

netcat Reviews

9 Best Angry IP Scanner Alternatives Reviewed 2021 (Free & Paid)
Netcat lacks a lot of the documentation you can easily find with software like AngryIP or Nmap which in my opinion is its biggest drawback. If you’re thinking about trying out Netcat, check out our Netcat Cheat Sheet to quickly pull up powerful and useful commands. Netcat is compatible with Windows, Linux, and macOS systems.
Top 5 Best Port Scanners
Netcat is one of the oldest network tools in the "Unixverse", it's been there since 1995, and the last official version is from 2004. Although it has many forks and variants that work pretty well on modern operating systems, like ncat from the Nmap suite, or this alternative Netcat version from Mike Frysinger.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, MASSCAN should be more popular than netcat. It has been mentiond 27 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.

MASSCAN mentions (27)

  • Mass Scanning
    Can I get banned for mass scanning with https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan or does it slow down any other vms from other persons? Source: 11 months ago
  • Has anyone ever had their homelab or network hacked? What happened?
    Nope, this doesn't work any more. Shodan checks all ports (so any attackers using data from Shodan already know which ports you have open), and tools like masscan (https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan) let you portscan the entire IPv4 address space in less than 10 minutes. Source: 12 months ago
  • Private server intruded
    The discord user at the time used the tool "Masscan" to scan every 25565 port on the internet, he claims he was able to get the entire internet scanned in just a few minutes with a 512MB buyvm slice. Source: about 1 year ago
  • My home server is frustrating me. Please help me, home server wizards.
    Changing the default port does nothing for security. It only prevents some basic brute force or default password scripts. Anyone is able to scan for it in no time anyway (https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan). Source: about 1 year ago
  • Should I be Concerned?
    But it should blow away the far-too-common belief that no-one's after you because you're not interesting enough. IPv4 is smaller than we think. It is not difficult to scan the entire ipv4 space in minutes. And every single one of those is going to knock your door on the way past. Source: about 1 year ago
View more

netcat mentions (7)

  • could not connect to the rhel-9 from putty in windows machine
    If you don't like using telnet, that's fine. Don't use it. There are plenty of other options available. Use netcat. Or use netcat. Or use netcat. Or read and write directly to /dev/tcp/hostname/port using shell constructs. Or run openssl s_client if you suspect something complicated is listening on the other end. There is more than one way to do it and ways that are not your way still work. Source: 10 months ago
  • The HTTP crash course nobody asked for
    Reminder, there are many different netcats, here are some of the most commons: - netcat-traditional http://www.stearns.org/nc/ - netcat-openbsd : https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.bin/nc/netcat.c (also packaged in Debian) - ncat https://nmap.org/ncat/ - netcat GNU: https://netcat.sourceforge.net/ (quite rare) To prevent any confusion, I like to recommend socat: http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Gaining remote access to a computer with a reverse shell attack in Node.js
    A common tool to execute a reverse shell is called netcat. If you're using macOS, it should be installed by default. You can check by running nc -help in a terminal window. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Programm to send and receive TCP/UDP Packets
    You could try using Ncat on Windows or netcat on Linux, though it's a command-line only tool if that matters. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Is there a way to copy a file from a remote shell to local without using scp?
    If you have netcat, you can easily set up a transfer from one machine to the other:. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing MASSCAN and netcat, you can also consider the following products

Nmap - Nmap Free Security Scanner, Port Scanner, & Network Exploration Tool. Download open source software for Linux, Windows, UNIX, FreeBSD, etc.

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.

Advanced IP Scanner - Advanced IP Scanner shows all network devices, gives you access to shared folders, and can even remotely switch computers off. Download it Free.

tcpdump - tcpdump is a common packet analyzer that runs under the command line.

Angry IP Scanner - Open-source and cross-platform network scanner designed to be fast and simple to use

socat - socat is a relay for bidirectional data transfer between two independent data channels.