# Whosthere

16 Hacker News commenters recommended Whosthere and 9 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 1 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** A clean terminal tool for exploring devices on a local network without elevated privileges. Critics mainly report that it won't run on macOS without lowering security settings.

## Why people recommend it

- Works well on home networks (3 comments): "Installed on raspbian, works wonders, much better than the thing i vibecoded yesterday." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734267)) "otherwise awesome tool, i am definitely going to be using this more often." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46732390)) "So far works great on my network!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734617))
- Polished, feature-rich look (2 comments): "it looks more complete and feature rich and Go is a better choice for sure" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46741537)) "much nicer on the eye than most (all?) nmap-guis out of the box" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46738591))

## What people warn about

- Limited on Wayland and SSH (3 comments): "I wouldn't call it modern if Wayland is outright not supported." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733001)) "So I can't run this TUI over SSH or a virtual terminal." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733526)) "It means it has a dependency on X11." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46732893))
- Blocked by macOS security checks (2 comments): "Couldn't run it on macOS Tahoe. I believe this requires me lowering the security to allow it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46733795)) "Apple could not verify `whosthere' is free of malware that may harm your Mac" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46734485))
- Shows no open ports (2 comments): "I think it just performs a full scan initially on my laptop, following scans either didn't success or didn't involve TCP connect scan" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46732737)) "It says 'Open ports: (None)' for all devices on my network, despite there being open ports on many of them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46732310))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [NetViews](https://hackerapproved.com/p/netviews.md): 17 recommend
- [Snitch](https://hackerapproved.com/p/snitch.md): 10 recommend
- [PingStalker](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pingstalker.md): 7 recommend
- [ping](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ping.md): 6 recommend
- [mtr](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mtr.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Whosthere", https://hackerapproved.com/p/whosthere/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).