Farsight vs Masscan
Farsight
github.comMasscan
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Farsight | Masscan |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 2 |
| Spec score · Port Scanner Software | 7.4 (#18) | 8.7 (#2) |
| License | The repository identifies its license as MIT. | Masscan is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, with no warranty stated in the license notice. |
| Purpose | Farsight is a stateless SYN-based TCP scanner and banner grabber built on Linux AF_XDP. | Masscan is an Internet-scale TCP port scanner designed for wide-range scanning of many machines. |
| Scanning | It can scan the entire IPv4 address space or a configured subset. | It supports arbitrary port and address ranges and asynchronous transmission. |
| Scope limitation | The README lists IPv4 only and Minecraft SLP only as current limitations. | The maker positions it for broad scans of many machines rather than intensive analysis of individual hosts. |
Plans
In their own words
Masscan
Masscan is a free command-line TCP port scanner for scanning many machines across wide address ranges. The project says one machine can transmit 10 million packets per second. It supports asynchronous transmission, arbitrary port and address ranges, and scanning IPv4 and IPv6 together without a separate IPv6 mode. Banner checks cover protocols and services including FTP, HTTP, IMAP4, memcached, POP3, SMTP, SSH, SSL, SMBv1, SMBv2, Telnet, RDP and VNC. Results can be saved as XML, binary, grepable, JSON or list output. Its usage and output are intended to be familiar to Nmap users, with some Nmap-compatible options. Masscan runs on Linux, macOS and Windows and is available for self-hosting. The project describes PF_RING DNA support for high-speed transmission and says it can use PF_RING ZC when the adapter name indicates it. It is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3, whose notice states there is no warranty. Users must specify ports and target IP addresses or simple ranges; DNS names are not accepted. The README warns that its custom TCP/IP stack can conflict with the local stack and describes using a separate source IP or firewalling its source port.