Batfish vs M-Lab NDT
Batfish
batfish.orgM-Lab NDT
measurementlab.netSide by side
| Figure | Batfish | M-Lab NDT |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | — |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 0 | 0 |
| Spec score · Network Testing Software | 8.0 (#12) | 7.7 (#20) |
| Integrations | The maker documents Ansible modules for extracting and validating configuration facts and asserting network behavior in playbooks. | M-Lab publishes NDT data through BigQuery and archives raw measurement data in Google Cloud Storage. |
| Purpose | Batfish analyzes network device configurations to find policy violations and validate network behavior. | NDT measures a connection’s capacity for bulk transport and reports upload speed, download speed, and latency metrics. |
| Support | The maker directs users with questions or feature requests to its Slack community or GitHub repository. | M-Lab directs NDT users to contact [email protected] for support. |
In their own words
Batfish
Batfish is an open-source tool for analyzing network device configurations and validating network behavior. It works from configuration files, so core analysis does not require direct access to network devices. Teams can inspect deployed configurations and check planned changes before deployment. Checks cover undefined references, MTU and AAA settings, template compliance, sensitive-service reachability and expected traffic paths. Batfish can test whether end-to-end reachability survives any single-link or single-device failure, compare current and planned reachability, assess ACL or firewall changes and evaluate functional equivalence across vendors. Pybatfish provides a Python 3 SDK, and example Jupyter notebooks are available. An all-in-one Docker container bundles Batfish and notebooks. It runs on operating systems supporting Docker. Documented support includes Arista, AWS, Azure, Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks and SONiC, while Aruba, Dell Force10 and Foundry have limited support.
M-Lab NDT
M-Lab NDT has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.