DeviceShelf

DeviceShelf is a local-first network scanner that discovers every device on your LAN or Wi-Fi, works out what each one is, and keeps watching. It replaces the usual scatter of a router admin page for leases, a terminal for ARP queries, a lookup site for MAC vendors and a separate port scanner with one place that also remembers what was there yesterday. Scan data stays on your own device, there's no cloud backend at all, and the licence is checked offline.

By default it runs non-intrusive TCP connect probes, with scan profiles that range from a quick sweep to a deep scan across all 65,535 ports, and it can watch several interfaces at once so Wi-Fi, Ethernet and VLANs show up together. Identification combines MAC vendor lookup, DNS, mDNS and Bonjour, NetBIOS, SNMP, UPnP, TTL and DHCP fingerprints to classify each device as a router, computer, phone, printer, camera, NAS or IoT gadget. On top of discovery it tracks per-device bandwidth in real time, keeps 30 days of availability and latency history, monitors presence, and raises an alert when an unknown device joins.

The first scan is the inventory. Run a quick sweep, let the fingerprinting name what it can, and correct the rest by hand, and from then on every subsequent scan is a diff. A new MAC address on the guest Wi-Fi triggers an unknown-device alert, a printer that drops off shows up in the availability history, and a NAS whose latency creeps up over a fortnight is visible on the 30-day chart rather than in someone's memory. The deep profiles are for the occasional audit, when you want to know exactly which ports a camera left open.

A security report scores risk per device and adds CVE hints for the services it recognises. An optional AI assistant is bring-your-own-key, with Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure, Mistral, Groq, Google or a local Ollama model, and the app exposes an MCP server so an agent in Claude, Cursor or VS Code can ask questions about the network. Nothing is sent to a model unless you configure a key or point the app at Ollama on your own machine, which is a sensible way to add AI to a security tool without contradicting its own privacy pitch. There's a QR-based asset register with warranty tracking for the physical side of the inventory, and a built-in syslog server collects logs from routers and switches.

It ships in three editions on one licence. The desktop app runs on macOS 12 and later, Windows 10 and 11, and Linux. Mobile covers iOS 15 and later from the App Store and Android 7 and later as a direct APK. The server edition runs headless around the clock through Docker with host networking, a .deb or .rpm package, a macOS package that installs as a LaunchDaemon, or a Windows service, and adds uptime history, SNMP health, Docker and Proxmox status, syslog, custom sensors, and daily availability per device and service with retries, dependencies and CSV export.

It's built for homelabs, small offices, consultants who audit client networks, and privacy-conscious users who want 24/7 monitoring without a subscription or a vendor holding their network map. Compared with cloud-managed scanners, the difference is that nothing is uploaded, licensing is verified offline with an ed25519 signature, and there's no monthly fee. Compared with nmap, the difference is persistence and presentation, since the history, the alerts and the reports are the product rather than a one-off scan result. A few things to weigh. The personal licence is bound to one email, so a company should read the terms before rolling it across a team. Android arrives as a direct APK rather than through Google Play, which is fine for a homelab and a policy question for a managed fleet. And because there's no cloud, always-on monitoring means running the server edition on hardware of your own rather than paying for a hosted dashboard. Those are consequences of the design rather than gaps, and the trial is long enough to find out whether they matter to you.

Pricing is a one-time purchase. DeviceShelf costs 59 euros for a personal licence that covers the desktop, mobile and server editions on every platform, and the Shelf Bundle, which adds the companion ServerShelf product, is 89 euros. A seven-day free trial needs no card, there's a 14-day money-back guarantee, and the licence is bound to the buyer's email. A live demo runs at demo.deviceshelf.app, the current version at the time of writing is 1.9.27, and support is at hello@deviceshelf.app with community channels on Mastodon, Bluesky, Telegram, Discord and Matrix.