NetMonitor vs Egress Recon

10 professional network tools. Zero cloud. Zero ads. Zero subscriptions. Everything runs locally on your Mac. NetMonitor is a complete network monitoring and diagnostics toolkit built for macOS. Scan your network, discover every connected device, trace routes across the globe, and diagnose issues in seconds — all without creating an account or sending a single byte off your machine. WHO IT'S FOR • Network admins — Monitor infrastructure and catch rogue devices • Developers — Debug connectivity, inspect DNS, scan ports • Homelab enthusiasts — Map your entire network and track every device NETWORK DASHBOARD See your entire network at a glance. A live health score grades your connection quality in real time, combining latency, packet loss, and DNS responsiveness into a single number. Monitor gateway reachability, public IP, ISP details, and live connection events — all in one view. DEVICE DISCOVERY Find devices other apps miss. NetMonitor's multi-phase scanning engine uses ARP, Bonjour, TCP probes, and reverse DNS to build a complete picture of your network. See IP and MAC addresses, vendor names, open ports, running services, and connection history for every device. 10 BUILT-IN DIAGNOSTIC TOOLS • Ping — ICMP with TCP fallback, live latency graphs, and packet statistics • Traceroute — Hop-by-hop path analysis with timing • GeoTrace — Visual traceroute plotted on a world map • World Ping — Test reachability from 20+ global nodes simultaneously • Port Scanner — TCP scanning with preset and custom port ranges • DNS Lookup — Query A, AAAA, MX, NS, TXT, and CNAME records • Speed Test — Download and upload throughput with peak speed and jitter tracking • WiFi Heatmap — Walk-around signal survey with floorplan overlay • WHOIS — Domain registration and ownership lookup • Bonjour Browser — Discover mDNS services on your network WIFI HEATMAPPING Import a floorplan or use freeform mode, then walk around to map signal strength across your space. Identify dead zones and optimize access point placement with real data instead of guesswork. GEOTRACE See the physical path your traffic takes. GeoTrace plots each hop on a satellite map so you can visualize routing across cities, countries, and continents. IPHONE COMPANION Connect to NetMonitor on your iPhone over your local network via Bonjour. Synchronize devices, run remote diagnostics, and monitor your network from either platform. No cloud relay — communication stays on your LAN. TIMELINE & EVENT HISTORY Every scan, device change, and network event is logged. Scroll back through your network history to spot patterns, track when devices appeared or disappeared, and review past diagnostics. No data ever leaves your device. No analytics. No tracking. Just tools that work.

You are on a guest Wi-Fi you did not choose. Something will not connect and nobody can tell you why. Egress Recon answers that from your phone, in under a second. WHICH PORTS GET OUT Sixteen common outbound ports, tried against real public services. You get more than "open" or "closed": • Refused and timed out are different answers. One means something on the network actively rejected the connection; the other means it was dropped silently. • Intercepted is its own finding. The connection succeeded, but the thing that replied was not the service you asked for — a portal, a proxy, or a middlebox re-signing TLS. WHAT NAT YOU ARE BEHIND Your public address, and whether your NAT gives you a reusable mapping or a symmetric one — the reason a video call falls back to a relay. Carrier-grade NAT is reported with its confidence and the evidence behind it, never as a bare label. IPv6 and NAT64 state, and whether you can reach your own public address from inside. WHAT IT DOES TO DNS Whether plain DNS gets out. Whether the network's resolver agrees with a public one. Whether it invents answers for names that cannot exist. And whether DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS still work when plain DNS does not — each tested with a real query, not just a connection. WI-FI VERSUS CELLULAR The most useful thing a network tool can tell you is "this Wi-Fi blocks it, and your cellular connection does not." Egress Recon runs the same tests over both and shows the difference — attributing it correctly in both directions, because blaming the café for something your carrier blocks helps nobody. BEHIND A CAPTIVE PORTAL It tells you the portal is there, shows the URL it is pushing you to, and labels the results "before you sign in." Sign in, run again, and it shows you exactly what changed. IT SHOWS ITS WORK Every verdict comes with what was actually observed: the banner the server sent, the certificate it presented and who issued it, the exact response that came back. You can check the reasoning instead of trusting a colored label. Where something cannot be determined, it says so and why. Two ports in the standard set have no public server to test against, so they stay untested rather than showing a red cell that means nothing. Share any run as text, a web page, a PDF, or JSON. Saved runs are grouped by network. PRIVACY • No analytics, no telemetry, no accounts, no ads, no third-party SDKs. • It never scans your network. Every probe goes to a public internet service — never your router, never your other devices. That is why it never asks for local network permission. • It does not read your Wi-Fi name. That needs location permission, which it never requests. • Saved runs stay on your device. A report leaves only when you share it. Egress Recon for Mac and for iPhone and iPad are both free apps on one App Store record. Requires iOS 17 or iPadOS 17.