Angry IP Scanner vs Advanced IP Scanner: open-source sweeper or Windows point-and-click?

A user rings: “the shared PC in the warehouse is off the network again.” You don’t know its IP, only that it’s somewhere on the 10.30.x floor VLAN. What you want is a tool that finds it in seconds, shows the name and MAC, and lets you jump straight into RDP or reboot it. Both of these free scanners will find it. What happens next, and how the tool fits into the rest of your week, is where they part ways.

Angry IP Scanner is an open-source, cross-platform host and port scanner with a command line. Advanced IP Scanner, from Famatech (the company behind Radmin), is a Windows-only tool designed around “find the machine, then act on it”. As with any scanner, run either one only on networks you own or are authorized to manage.

At a glance

The differences that matter

Acting on what you find

This is Advanced IP Scanner’s home ground. Right-click a result and you can open RDP, start a Radmin session if Radmin Server runs on the target, open its web UI, browse its shares, or send a shutdown or reboot. Wake-on-LAN is there too, which is handy after a power cut when half the office didn’t come back. For the warehouse-PC scenario above, it’s a two-click job.

Angry IP Scanner gives you “open with” commands per host — web browser, SSH, ping, traceroute and whatever else you add in its settings. That’s flexible (you can add a mstsc /v:${fetcher.ip} style command yourself) but it’s not trying to be a remote-management console.

Inventory, ports and automation

Flip the question and Angry IP Scanner leads. Its model is a table of addresses with columns you choose — ping, hostname, MAC, vendor, NetBIOS info and an arbitrary TCP port list — which makes it good at answers such as “which hosts on this VLAN have 3389 or 445 open?”. And it runs unattended:

& "C:\Tools\AngryIP\ipscan.exe" -f:range 10.30.0.1 10.30.3.254 -o "C:\Scans\floor-$(Get-Date -f yyyyMMdd).csv" -q

Schedule that and you have a daily inventory to diff. Our VLAN-to-CSV guide builds this out, including PowerShell clean-up. Advanced IP Scanner exports CSV, HTML or XML from the GUI, but has no documented command line, so repeatable runs mean clicking.

Platform and openness

If anyone on the team works from a Mac or a Linux laptop, Angry IP Scanner is the one tool that behaves the same everywhere. Its code is public, so you can check exactly what a fetcher sends. The historic downside — needing Java — has largely gone: since 3.10.0 the Windows and macOS builds ship with a bundled runtime.

Advanced IP Scanner is Windows-only and closed source. Famatech presents it as free; the pages we checked don’t spell out separate commercial terms, so read the licence text it shows you before rolling it out company-wide.

Security-team friction

Both tools are everyday admin utilities, but any network scanner is dual-use, so some EDR and SOC policies alert when one runs. Before you run a sweep, make sure the security team knows the tool, the host it runs from and the time window; ideally, allow-list a specific admin workstation rather than running scanners from arbitrary PCs.

Speed and accuracy

Both scan a /24 quickly on a healthy LAN; the practical differences come from settings. Angry IP Scanner exposes thread count, timeouts and ping method directly, which helps when ICMP is blocked by Windows Firewall. Advanced IP Scanner offers a simpler speed/accuracy trade-off. On Windows hosts that drop ping, whichever tool probes a TCP port such as 445 or 3389 will find more.

Verdict

Pick Angry IP Scanner if…

• you want scheduled, scripted sweeps with CSV output;
• you need a custom TCP port list per scan;
• your team uses more than one operating system;
• you prefer open-source tools you can inspect.

Pick Advanced IP Scanner if…

• you mostly find a Windows machine and then act on it — RDP, shutdown, Wake-on-LAN, browse shares;
• you already use Radmin;
• you want the simplest possible GUI for helpdesk colleagues.

Many Windows shops keep Advanced IP Scanner on helpdesk PCs for point-and-click work and Angry IP Scanner on admin machines for inventory and scripting. If share permissions are the real question, look at LizardSystems Network Scanner instead.

Read more

• Angry IP Scanner review
• Advanced IP Scanner review
• Angry IP Scanner vs LizardSystems Network Scanner
• The full list in LAN & Port Scanners