Batfish vs Shadow
Batfish
batfish.orgShadow
shadow.github.ioSide by side
| Figure | Batfish | Shadow |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | — |
| Free plan | — | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 0 | 0 |
| Spec score · Network Testing Software | 8.0 (#12) | 6.8 (#29) |
| Purpose | Batfish analyzes network device configurations to find policy violations and validate network behavior. | Shadow is a scientific experimentation tool for research, development, testing, and evaluation of real networked applications on simulated networks. |
| Support | The maker directs users with questions or feature requests to its Slack community or GitHub repository. | The project directs users to GitHub Discussions for community support and GitHub Issues for bug reports. |
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.