Software Alternatives & Reviews

w3af VS Shodan

Compare w3af VS Shodan and see what are their differences

w3af logo w3af

w3af is a Web Application Attack and Audit Framework

Shodan logo Shodan

Shodan is the world's first search engine for Internet-connected devices.
  • w3af Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-29
  • Shodan Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-16

w3af videos

How to use the w3af website scanner in kali Linux

More videos:

  • Tutorial - What is W3af? | How to install Web Application Attack & Audit Framework?
  • Tutorial - W3AF Tutorial Part II using the GUI

Shodan videos

Searching the Internet with Shodan (Seen in Mr. Robot)

More videos:

  • Review - Bestech Shodan Unboxing & First Impressions
  • Review - Bestech Shodan FULL Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to w3af and Shodan)
Monitoring Tools
22 22%
78% 78
Security
20 20%
80% 80
Web Application Security
24 24%
76% 76
Cyber Security
24 24%
76% 76

User comments

Share your experience with using w3af and Shodan. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Shodan seems to be a lot more popular than w3af. While we know about 92 links to Shodan, we've tracked only 1 mention of w3af. 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.

w3af mentions (1)

  • 3 reasons why any website's security is important
    Testing security of your website is easy. There are dozen of web security testing tools out there you can use for free. Arachni and w3af are famous open source security scanners you can use. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago

Shodan mentions (92)

  • Introducing OSINT Template Engine: An open source OSINT Tool.
    Transform OSINT sources such as shodan, bgpview & urlscan into templates which you can use to query & store any and each of the API endpoints they provide. Source: 10 months ago
  • Some outgoing ports (e.g, port 22) are blocked
    I'm a little surprised you're asking this but as you don't know - if you set the rulebase correctly, you won't get hammered by "public". A lot of people (of course not people here) don't do that which is why shodan.io is full of servers with SSH exposed to the world. Source: 10 months ago
  • Does anyone want to vet this job opportunity?
    Eh, request a full demo before signing anything. If they make you buy before you can try, move on. Just be advised that data they collect from your site may be used in a database that puts a target on your back. Similar to how shodan.io works. I would probe them on how they handle customer data and if data is shared, partitioned, or isolated to ensure safety from a platform leak. They want to be a security... Source: 10 months ago
  • Security issue or coincidence?
    My network is being hit by China and Russia many times per hour. Make sure your firewall is up-to-date and not have any services available on the Internet (WAN). Look at shodan.io which shows you _everything_ is searched on the Internet. Source: 11 months ago
  • Onion sites crawling: Weird mass "HTTP/1.1 200 " HTTP status line returning?
    In the cases of nginx or apache, I suspect they may be acting as proxies to some backend that also chooses not to send a reason phrase back. Searching for "Reason Phrase" yields a number of bug reports/frameworks that may omit it, and shodan.io shows apache tomcat and a few other services/software that omit the code as well. Source: 11 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing w3af and Shodan, you can also consider the following products

Nikto - Nikto is an Open Source (GPL) web server scanner which performs comprehensive tests against web...

Acunetix - Audit your website security and web applications for SQL injection, Cross site scripting and other...

Burp Suite - Burp Suite is an integrated platform for performing security testing of web applications.

Nessus - Nessus Professional is a security platform designed for businesses who want to protect the security of themselves, their clients, and their customers.

Censys - Censys helps organizations, individuals, and researchers find and monitor every server on the Internet to reduce exposure and improve security.

Zed Attack Proxy - The Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an easy to use integrated penetration testing tool for finding...