bmon vs Sniffnet

bmon is a free bandwidth monitor and rate estimator for Linux and macOS. It captures networking statistics for monitoring and debugging, presenting them through an interactive curses interface or programmable text output for scripts. The 5.0 release notes describe graph rendering with Braille cells, JSON output, traffic-control ingress and egress display filters, and IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in additional information. Installation guidance covers Fedora and CentOS 7 packages, Debian or Ubuntu and CentOS 6 builds, and macOS installation through Homebrew or source compilation. Release notes also mention CI builds for Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, with fixes for FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, and OpenBSD builds. The repository lists MIT and BSD license files. bmon is maintained by tgraf and hosted on GitHub Pages. Its free plan costs nothing.

Sniffnet is a free network monitoring app for Linux, macOS, and Windows. It displays overall internet traffic statistics and real-time charts, and can show which programs use bandwidth. Users can choose a network adapter, filter observed traffic, and import or export PCAP capture reports. Sniffnet identifies local network connections, shows remote hosts’ geographical locations, and finds host domain names and ASNs. It recognizes more than 6,000 upper-layer services, protocols, trojans, and worms. Users can configure notifications for network events and import custom IP blacklists to highlight potentially dangerous connections. The app supports live capture, display filters, protocol dissectors, and offline trace analysis; it reads PCAPNG and CAP files as well as PCAP. Custom themes and 26 languages are available. The listed Sniffnet plan is free and the software is open-source under MIT or Apache-2.0. A 2025 security audit reported one low-severity finding, which had been fixed. Most functionality uses offline databases, while reverse DNS lookups provide hostnames for IP addresses.