Colasoft MAC Scanner is a free network scanner software for Windows. It can scan all the ports of your local network for connected devices. It can provides you the details such as: IP Address, MAC Address, Host Name, Workgroup, and Manufacturer.
It provides the details in tabular format, and you can easily export the data to txt or csv format. The program is helpful for Network Administrators to maintain a list of Network assets. You can easily check who is using your network.
How to Scan Network for Connected Devices using Colasoft MAC Scanner:
It is very easy to use this tool to scan the entire network, and find details of all the connected devices.
You can click Start button on the main toolbar or press F5 key from your keyboard to start the scanning process. You can run it from Start Menu Run command also by typing “csmac” and pressing Enter key. It automatically detects all the Local Subnet list or you can click Refresh from the Local Subnet dropdown. It takes just a few seconds to scan the entire network, and keeps showing details of the devices while scanning.
Once the scanning is complete, you can export the list of connected devices. You can export the list in .TXT, or .CSV format, and also in its native .CSCNTAB (Colasoft Name Table File).
The size of the program is just 6.79 MB and it can works with almost every Windows version.
If you want to export only some records for later reference; you can do this too by selecting the records you want and click the Export Selected button on the main toolbar or use context menu command to do so.
More commands like Copy, Delete, Find are also there in the Default toolbar and in the Edit menu. Also if the scanning process is taking much time, you can then Pause or Stop the process any time by pressing the desired button.
Another interesting feature of this software is that it also lets you specify number of threads that can be used for scanning. You can choose between 1 to 100 threads. More the number of threads, faster will be the scanning performance.
Limitations of this software:
Despite being good at what it does, this software comes with its limitations and drawbacks as well. First of all, the documentation of this software talks about some features, which are actually not available in the free version. Secondly, I tested this software multiple times, but it never gave me the “Manufacturer” information. On the other hand, Nirsoft Wireless Network Watcher did a much better job at providing that information.
Conclusion:
There are many network scanner tools are out there (like, NetToolSet, NetStalker). And frankly, I did not find anything additional in this software. On the contrary, I would say that it lacks features as compared to other software out there. So, if you are looking for a good network scanner that is more feature rich and provides more information, I suggest you use one of the other software I have linked above.
