Software Alternatives & Reviews

netcat VS Nmap

Compare netcat VS Nmap and see what are their differences

netcat logo netcat

Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections...

Nmap logo Nmap

Nmap Free Security Scanner, Port Scanner, & Network Exploration Tool. Download open source software for Linux, Windows, UNIX, FreeBSD, etc.
  • netcat Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-11-19
  • Nmap Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-06-15

netcat

Categories
  • Monitoring Tools
  • Log Management
  • Productivity
  • Security
Website netcat.sourceforge.net
Details $

Nmap

Categories
  • Security
  • Security Monitoring
  • Monitoring Tools
  • Network Scanning
Website nmap.org
Details $-

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

Nmap videos

Nmap Tutorial For Beginners - 1 - What is Nmap?

More videos:

  • Review - Nmap - Review of Scan Types
  • Review - LABS 50 Bypassing Windows Firewall Using Nmap Evasion Techniques REVIEW

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to netcat and Nmap)
Monitoring Tools
19 19%
81% 81
Log Management
100 100%
0% 0
Security
10 10%
90% 90
Network Scanning
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

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.

Nmap Reviews

The Top 5 Open Source Vulnerability Scanners
Nmap is a tool that scans ports, does service fingerprinting, and identifies versions of operating systems. Nmap also comes with a scripting engine that detects security vulnerabilities. Once these are detected, Vulcan’s platform can help you to prioritize and fix vulnerabilities.
Source: vulcan.io
9 Best Angry IP Scanner Alternatives Reviewed 2021 (Free & Paid)
If you’re a network administrator looking for more depth and raw power from a port scanner, look no further than Nmap. What Nmap lacks in frills and functional GUI it makes up for with sheer command-line based power. If you’re not a fan of strictly just a command-line interface, you can always use Zenmap, which is the exact same software just with a graphical interface. Both...
15 Best Nmap Alternatives Network Security Scanner
Nmap is an open-source tool that lots of IT professionals find useful in their careers. It is a tool that can locate available hosts and other services that they offer within a network. The Nmap program makes use of raw IP packets to find the hosts and services that are available.
10 Best WireShark Alternatives for Android Devices in 2021
Nmap is a popular open-source network scanning app for Android and desktop. While it works on both rooted and non-rooted Android, you get more functionality during a rooted Android smartphone. Like some apps, Nmap is not available on Google play store or their website.
Source: techreen.com
Alternatives to Nmap: from simple to advanced network scanning
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Nmap, the open-source network mapping tool that became the standard used by many IT professionals, but that can be a bit much if you only need to do general network maintenance and are intimidated by its command-line interface.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Nmap seems to be a lot more popular than netcat. While we know about 187 links to Nmap, we've tracked only 7 mentions of netcat. 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.

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

Nmap mentions (187)

  • Show HN: DN$ – an innovative, ad-supported DNS resolver
    Following fingerprint at https://nmap.org/cgi-bin/submit.cgi?new-service :. - Source: Hacker News / 19 days ago
  • Writing a Network Scanner using Python
    A network scanner is a software tool that scans the network for connected devices. It is also used for diagnostic and investigative purposes to find and categorize what devices are running on a network. This tool takes an IP address or a range of IP addresses as input and then scans each IP Addresses sequentially and determines whether a device is present on that particular IP address or not. It scans the network... - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • NAS up but DSM seems to be unavailable
    ➜ ~ nmap 192.168.1.201 Starting Nmap 7.94 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2023-12-07 22:02 CET Nmap scan report for 192.168.1.201 Host is up (0.0061s latency). Not shown: 994 closed tcp ports (conn-refused) PORT STATE SERVICE 7000/tcp open afs3-fileserver 8008/tcp open http 8009/tcp open ajp13 8443/tcp open https-alt 9000/tcp open cslistener 9080/tcp open glrpc Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in... Source: 4 months ago
  • Scanning ports and finding network vulnerabilities using nmap
    ┌──(figaro㉿kali)-[~/Desktop] └─$ sudo nmap -O 142.250.203.131 1 ⨯ Starting Nmap 7.91 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2021-11-10 12:36 EST Nmap scan report for waw07s06-in-f3.1e100.net (142.250.203.131) Host is up (0.0034s latency). Not shown: 998 filtered ports PORT STATE SERVICE 80/tcp open http 443/tcp open https Warning: OSScan results may be... - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Day 17 - Build from the source
    Now let’s go to the "Project Page" for the developers http://nmap.org/ and grab the very latest cutting-edge version. Look for the download page, then the section “Source Code Distribution” and the link for the "Latest development nmap release tarball" and note the URL for it - something like:. Source: 7 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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.

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

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

Zenmap - Zenmap is the official cross-platform GUI for the Nmap Security Scanner.

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

Fing - Discover which devices are connected to any Wi-Fi network, map devices, detect intruders, assess...