What is Zenmap?

Zenmap is an free and open source GUI for Nmap. It is available on many operating systems (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, etc.) and makes Nmap easier to use for beginners. Zenmap is usually packaged with Nmap itself, but if you want to download it separately, you can do it at https://nmap.org/download.html.

Zenmap is not meant to replace Nmap, but to make it more useful. Here are some of the features of this program:

  • interactive and graphical results viewing – Zenmap can display Nmap’s normal output, but you can also arrange its display to show all ports on a host or all hosts running a particular service. It summarizes details about a single host or a com scan in a convenient display. You can even use Zenmap to draw a topology map of discovered networks.
  • comparison – you can use Zenmap to graphically show the differences between two scans. This can help you to track new hosts or services appearing on their networks, or existing ones going down.
  • repeatability – you can use Zenmap’s command profiles to run the same scan more than once.
  • ease of use – Zenmap is easy to use and is especially useful for people without much experience in Linux shell.

Here is a picture of a scan in Zenmap:

zenmap example scan

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