If you’ve ever managed even a small office network, you know the drill: Angry IP Scanner in one tab, a command prompt for ping and tracert in another, PuTTY or the Windows RDP client somewhere else, and a spreadsheet limping along to keep track of which device is which. It works, technically. It’s also exhausting.
Subnetlens is a new Windows desktop tool built around a simple pitch — stop switching apps. It scans your network, figures out what’s connected, draws it as an interactive map, and hands you a full diagnostic toolkit without ever leaving the window. We spent time going through every screen of the app — the dashboard, the live network map, the scanning flow, the settings panel, and the toolkit — to see if it actually delivers on that promise. Here’s what we found.

What Exactly Is Subnetlens?

Subnetlens is built by HELIOSOFT LTD, a UK-registered software company, and runs on Windows 10 and 11 (64-bit only — there’s no Mac or Linux build, at least not yet). At the time of writing it’s sitting at version 1.0.0-beta.7, tagged as a Release Candidate, which in plain English means the feature set is locked and the team is mostly squashing edge-case bugs before dropping the “beta” label entirely.
The thing that’ll matter most to IT folks: this is a local-first tool through and through. There’s no mandatory account, no cloud dashboard, and according to the developer, no telemetry phoning home in the background. Every scan result, every device note, every stored credential sits on your machine. If you’re the type who checks the SHA-256 hash before running an installer (you should be), Subnetlens actually publishes one on its download page so you can verify the file with a quick Get-FileHash command in PowerShell.
One thing worth flagging up front for transparency: even though the feature set is locked and stable, the build we tested is still officially labelled v1.0.0-beta.7. It’s feature-complete, not experimental — but a few rough edges are still fair to expect before the “beta” tag comes off.

Related reading: if you’re setting up a home lab from scratch, our roundup of free Windows admin tools pairs nicely with this one.

Discovering and Mapping Your Network

Before anything else, the interface itself deserves a mention — it’s a dark-themed, card-based layout that feels closer to a modern SaaS dashboard than the dated, function-over-form utilities this category is used to. Sidebar navigation, colour-coded status badges, and clear typography make it approachable even if you’re not a career network engineer.
The core workflow starts on the Network Map page. You either type in a subnet manually (192.168.1.0/24, for example) or let the app auto-detect your active interface, hit Scan, and watch a multi-step pipeline work through ARP sweeps, ping checks, port probes, and hostname resolution. On our test network, a full 7-step scan finished in roughly 20–25 seconds, and the progress bar clearly labelled each stage as it went — “Step 2/7, Ping sweep,” and so on — so it never felt like the app had stalled.
The interface stayed responsive throughout: we could still click around other pages while a scan was running in the background, and Task Manager backed that up — Subnetlens held around 7% CPU and 374 MB of RAM during an active scan, with no unexpected disk or network spikes. That’s a reasonable footprint for a tool doing active network probing.

What you get at the end isn’t a flat list — it’s an actual node graph. Your router sits in the middle, and every connected device branches off it with a line, colour-coded by type: gateway, server, workstation, printer, phone, IoT gadget, and so on. It’s a genuinely satisfying way to see your network for the first time, especially if you’ve got smart plugs, cameras, or random IoT devices you’d forgotten were even connected.

The Device Classifier Does the Heavy Lifting

Here’s the part that impressed us most. Instead of just showing you an IP and a MAC address and leaving you to guess, Subnetlens tries to actually name the device. In our testing, it correctly labelled several common devices on the spot — a Tuya smart-home gadget and a Dahua camera among them — without any manual tagging on our part.
Under the hood, it’s cross-referencing open ports, MAC vendor prefixes, hostname strings, and service banners against a hand-built database covering more than 1,450 device signatures — everything from major router brands to IP camera manufacturers to smart-home gear. Click into any device and it’ll show you the top reasons behind that classification, so you’re not just taking the app’s word for it. A handful of devices on our network still came back labelled “Unknown,” which is a fair reminder that no offline classifier catches everything.

Real-Time Monitoring With Radar

Scanning once and walking away only tells you so much — networks change constantly. That’s where Radar comes in, a Pro-only feature that keeps a running timeline of events: a new device joining, an existing one dropping offline, or a port suddenly opening where it wasn’t before.
There’s also a Live Mode toggle that passively listens for mDNS and SSDP broadcasts, which are the “hey, I’m here” announcements most modern devices send out automatically. That means Subnetlens can spot a new phone or smart speaker the moment it joins your Wi-Fi, rather than waiting for the next scheduled scan to catch up.

The main Dashboard ties this together with an overall network health score, uptime percentage, and a breakdown of device types — a genuinely handy one-glance summary if you’re managing the same network day after day. On our test network, it settled on a health score in the “Excellent” range with all 9 devices reporting online, an average response time under 100ms, and a device-type breakdown split roughly between routers, servers, and IoT gear.

Installing It: What to Expect

The installer is a fairly light ~116 MB download. Windows Defender didn’t flag it during our install, though Microsoft SmartScreen did pop up its usual “unrecognised app” warning the first time we ran the executable — a normal hurdle for any newer, independently distributed Windows app, and you just click “Run anyway” to proceed. Once installed and actively scanning, the app’s memory footprint sat around 374 MB in Task Manager, which is on the heavier side for a utility but not unreasonable given it’s actively probing devices and rendering a live topology map.

26 Diagnostic Tools, One Window

This is where the “stop juggling five apps” pitch really lands. The IT Toolkit page bundles ping, traceroute, MTR, a port scanner, DNS lookup, WHOIS, TLS certificate checks, GeoIP lookup, a subnet calculator, and plenty more — 26 tools in total, organised into Network, Discovery, Security, and Utilities tabs.

The free tier gives you 8 of the essentials (ping, traceroute, DNS lookup among them), which honestly covers most quick troubleshooting needs. The remaining 18 — including MTR/pathping, TCP testing, and the deeper security-focused tools — sit behind the Pro upgrade. Every tool runs its output right there in the app, with results you can copy or export instead of squinting at a terminal window.
If you’re new to some of these acronyms, our beginner’s guide to network troubleshooting commands breaks down what ping, traceroute, and MTR actually tell you.

Security Extras: Risk Scoring and a Credential Vault

Two features push Subnetlens past “scanner” territory and into something closer to a lightweight security companion.
Risk Overview assigns each device a score from 0 to 100 based on things like an exposed RDP port, outdated TLS versions, or default credentials still in place — useful for spotting the weak links on your network before someone else does.
Credential Vault stores your login details locally using AES-256-GCM encryption with a heavy iteration count on the key derivation, and it can import existing entries from Bitwarden, 1Password, KeePass, or LastPass exports. Once stored, those credentials can auto-fill into the app’s built-in RDP, SSH, and command-line launchers — a small thing that saves a surprising number of clicks during routine admin work.

Automation, Reports, and Bigger-Picture Management

For anyone managing the same network long-term, Subnetlens supports scheduled scans using either cron expressions or simple interval presets, and can ping results straight to Slack, Discord, or Microsoft Teams through webhooks. There’s also a basic IP address management (IPAM) view, a Prometheus metrics endpoint for teams already running Grafana, and exportable HTML, CSV, and JSON reports — handy if you need to hand findings to a client or a manager.

Free vs Pro: What Actually Changes

Feature	Free	Pro — $79 one-time
Network scanning & topology map	Single subnet	Multi-subnet, CIDR /16–/32
Device classifier (1,451 patterns)	✓	✓
IT Toolkit	8 essential tools	All 26 tools
Radar + Live Mode monitoring	—	✓
Credential Vault	—	✓
Scheduled scans + webhooks	—	✓
Risk Overview / device scoring	—	✓
IPAM, SNMP topology, Prometheus export	—	✓
Computers per license	Unlimited	Up to 3

Pro is a genuine one-time purchase — no recurring billing — and it includes a year of updates plus a 14-day money-back window if it doesn’t fit your workflow.

Who Should Actually Get This?

Based on everything we saw poking around the app, four types of users get the most mileage out of it:

• MSPs juggling several client subnets who want per-client credential storage and scheduled monitoring without spinning up a server.
• Solo IT admins who need a quick way to see what’s on the office network without babysitting a full monitoring platform.
• Home-lab enthusiasts who want an actual topology view of their Pis, NAS boxes, and VMs instead of a plain device list.
• Security-minded teams running periodic internal checks who’d rather not license something like SolarWinds for occasional audits.

If your needs are lighter — you just want a quick list of IPs on your home network — a free tool like Angry IP Scanner still does that job fine. Subnetlens starts to make sense once you want the topology view, the built-in toolkit, and the option to keep monitoring after the initial scan. For more on securing your home setup once you know what’s connected, check our guide to locking down IoT devices on your home network.

Frequently Asked Questions