Here are some best free network inventory software for Windows. With these software, you can audit your home or office network for various network devices. You can find all the network printers switches, access points, network cards, computers, and various other devices pretty easily. They can either look for the devices in a specific IP range or you can feed them active directory details. These software list all the nodes along with the network devices and you can see their status. They also show if those devices can be pinged or whether you can retrieve more details from them. As an advanced feature, they can list system inventory from node in a network.
If you want to audit all the network devices in your network without visiting each node physically then you can use these software. Also, they are helpful for you if you work in the IT department. From your own PC, you can audit your current network for different kind of devices. You can prepare a report of the devices and then save that or do whatever with that. These can easily list Windows, Linux, and MAC like devices pretty easily. You can see their MAC address and manufacturer details about the network card installed on them. You can also use these to see if there is any suspicious device in network, so you can remove it.
Once we covered some software inventory tools for Windows. Those tools list all the installed software services on your PC and export the details. The Network inventory tool work in similar way. the only difference is that they primarily look for the network devices no matter what they are. As a pro part, they offer you some advanced features such getting software inventory from the connected nodes. No only the software inventory but with these you can also see hardware details. Along with this, in one of them, you can issue remote command for shutdown, ping, traceroute, etc.
Free Network Inventory Software for Windows:
Alloy Discovery Express
Alloy Discovery Express is one of the best free network inventory tools out there that you can use. It is free for a network consisting of 50 nodes. It uses different methods to list all the network devices in your network and then you can take some actions on that. You can use this to audit devices in your network using Domain or IP range. It offers you a simple interface where it shows the list of devices that you can analyze. And when you audit devices design domain then you can log in the remote device and see the software inventory.
When it completes the scan then it shows the details about the discovered devices in various tabs. And you can create different IP groups by specifying different ranges. It categorizes the devices in those categories and you can access them whenever you want to. However, this software cannot detect the mobile devices in the network if they are present. It can detect the Windows, Linux and MAC nodes and can list them based on any popular software is they using any such as MS Office, MSSQL Server. It can audit hardware on the remote machine as well.
Get this software from above link and then start using it. But before that, you will have to register on its main website. It will give you a license key that you will have to add in the software in order to activate it. After you activate it, you will be able to start using it. You can create IP groups on its main interface as many as you want. Also, you can go with the domain method to list network nodes in your network. I will suggest you to install this on a Windows server and then you can fill the credentials to audit remote PCs fully.
Slitheris Network Discovery
Slitheris Network Discovery is another free software for audit a network and get the report. It offers you an interactive and intuitive interface where it shows a list of the devices in the network. it shows a detailed overview of the devices and you can export the list as an Excel file (CSV). Here uses the IP search method to look for the devices and shows details like MAC address, brand, uptime, estimated manufacturer year, assigned IP address, operating system, and some others. It generates tabular data that you can easily export. This is a simple software on a Windows server or any other edition easily audit your network.
In the free version of Slitheris Network Discovery, you can use it to be used in network having not more than 50 devices. It can identify almost any kind of device including Android and iPhone. The each device it lists on its interface, you can see its brad along with ping interval and Net BIOS name, and others. It can either take a default IP range or you can specify yours there and it will start working.
You can download this software from above and then simply open it up. Hit the “Scan Selected IP Range” button from the toolbar to start scan. You can see the progress of the scan on the graph like interface. As it finds devices in your network, it will keep listing them. However, it may take a few extra seconds to extract other details about the discovered devices. You can see main interface of this software in the screenshot above.
NEWT Professional Network Inventory
NEWT Professional Network Inventory is yet another network inventory software that you can try. Just like above software, you use it in the same way. You can give it an IP range and then it will audit all the devices in the current network. However, it cannot identify mobile devices but can list them. It uses SNMP protocol to list devices and show the list to you. You can see some basic details about the node and then you can export that data. After auditing the any network device, it export the report to an HTML file that you can share with anyone.
For free, you can use this software in network having 25 nodes. For more number of nodes, you will have to sign up for its pro plan. You can anytime audit any device in your network and export the stats. After it lists devices that it finds, you can enter the credentials there to get more details about the hardware and software present on that node. It can even get the running services on the remote node and detail of the virus definitions. Not only this, but you can use this to get the list of startup items and hard disk space details as well.
This software is not that big in size. You can easily get this from above link and then install it. Next, you use the Scan option from its interface to scan an IP rage in your network. As it hits any device, it will immediately list it. You see the name of the devices and their corresponding IP addresses on its interface. And when it stops the scan, you can specify the credentials to any node by right clicking on it. Next, it will list the software and other details that you can export. Apart from this, you can execute some remote command on the node such as shutdown, restart, etc.
Open-AudIT
Open-AudIT is as the name suggests is actually an open source network inventory software that you can use. This is actually a browser-based tool to detect different kinds of networking devices in a network. It offers you different amazing features such as network device discovery, agent-less discovery, server inventory software, software license management tool, IT asset tracking, and others. When you install it, it opens in the browser where you can log in to the main dashboard and then start auditing the network. It uses the domain method for identifying different nodes in the network and then you can export them.
The default username and password for the dashboard is admin/password. After logging in, you can start using it to discover devices by specifying the domain information. This tool main work with the domain settings which is why I wasn’t able to fully test it because we don’t have Windows server installation. But without that, you can go for the default discovery mode in which it uses Nmap to find the devices and list them. The whole documentation about this is available on its main website and it is a good tool for IT professionals.
Final thoughts
These are the best free network inventory software that I could find that you can use for free. Some of them let you use the free version for the limited number of nodes and that it fine. You can easily audit your network for different kind of devices and analyze the report. Also, there are other some advanced tool in them which you will like. So, if you are looking for some free network inventory software then this post will be helpful. You just have to run them inside a local home or office network and audit devices.
