Software Alternatives & Reviews

netcat VS TCPView

Compare netcat VS TCPView and see what are their differences

netcat logo netcat

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

TCPView logo TCPView

TCPView is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on...
  • netcat Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-11-19
  • TCPView Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05

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

TCPView videos

TCPView - Monitor the Network Activity on your local computer.

More videos:

  • Review - RouterGods - TCPView utility for easy port/process info

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to netcat and TCPView)
Monitoring Tools
51 51%
49% 49
Log Management
59 59%
41% 41
Security
51 51%
49% 49
OS & Utilities
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using netcat and TCPView. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

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.

TCPView Reviews

We have no reviews of TCPView yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, TCPView should be more popular than netcat. It has been mentiond 37 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.

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: 11 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: almost 3 years ago
View more

TCPView mentions (37)

  • Why there is no good task manager and system monitoring software on linux?
    It's basically like https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/tcpview but for Linux. Source: 10 months ago
  • Some people prefer using DCS on Steam for the download speed, yet I get my whole 1Gbps bw used every time with the ED installer. What is the deal?
    Unfortunately I don't think there is an existing list of CDN endpoints to pick from, I found a few by starting updates while using a VPN and using tcpview to find which IP address it was connecting to. Once I'd found one that was faster than the default I opened my hosts file: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts. Source: 11 months ago
  • How do I know what ports an application is using?
    Try https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/tcpview and it will show you in real time what ports are being used to connect to there. Source: 11 months ago
  • How to detect RCE/arbitrary code injection/RAT's from video games
    Maybe something like TCPView: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/tcpview. Source: about 1 year ago
  • strange remote listeners from private ip with "winrm" command
    I understand that netstat isnt exactly user friendly so if you'd like to keep monitoring the situation you can use SysInternal's TCPView https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/tcpview which displays everything for you in a GUI. Just don't forget to filter for only listening ports cause it will show all connection states by default (use the green flag icon). It even has the added benefit of... Source: about 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing netcat and TCPView, 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.

Fping (open source) - fping is a program to send ICMP echo probes to network hosts, similar to ping, but much better performing when pinging multiple hosts.

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

CurrPorts - CurrPorts displays the list of all currently opened TCP/IP and UDP ports on your local computer.

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

Ping Meter Gadget - Customizable, graphical, semi-transparent ping (latency) meter.