Top 7 Best WiFi Scanner Apps for macOS

What Features Should a Good Wireless Scanner App Have?

A good wireless scanner app is easy to use. Just because a wireless scanner app has advanced features aimed at professionals and experts doesn’t mean that its user interface has to be grossly outdated and mindbogglingly unintuitive. When developers take the lazy road and force users to study lengthy manuals just because they couldn’t make everything obvious without them, it says a lot about their attitude toward their customers and toward the software they are making.

A good wireless scanner app supports all modern WiFi standards. While your home router may have a yellowish tint due to its age, Wi-Fi Alliance has been actively improving the WiFi technology to achieve wider ranges, fewer problems with interference, and faster speeds.

Just because your router doesn’t support the latest WiFi standard doesn’t mean there aren’t other routers nearby that do. With a good wireless scanner app, you will be able to detect them all and see how they could affect the performance of your wireless network.

Finally, a good wireless scanner app is developed by a team of experienced developers who stand behind their product and frequently release updates and bugfixes to make it even better. With these criteria in mind, we’ve select five WiFi scanner macOS apps for your convenience.

Thanks to its three scanning modes, NetSpot offers a comprehensive approach to WiFi network optimization. Use Inspector mode when you need a quick snapshot of nearby wireless networks to see how many there are and how they could possibly influence your own network (WiFi signal interference is a big problem).

Once you have a solid idea of the wireless environment in which your network is located, you can analyze it in more detail using Survey mode, which allows you to create a colorful signal heatmap that clearly shows all areas where your signal is weaker than it should be.

Often, the heatmap alone is enough to determine what kind of change you should make to improve your signal, but you can take it a step further by simulating changes to your WiFi network or even a brand-new WiFi deployment thanks to Planning mode (available since NetSpot 3). This proactive approach saves time and resources by minimizing the need for post-installation adjustments.

As a cutting-edge WiFi scanner Mac app, NetSpot fully supports networks broadcasting on the 6 GHz frequency, future-proofing it for emerging WiFi 6E networks. You can run it on both Windows and macOS, and new survey projects are now cross-platform, so you can start it on your Windows laptop and finish it on your MacBook, for example.

To use NetSpot as a WiFi scanner on macOS:

• Download the latest version from the official website and install it like any third-party app.
• Launch NetSpot and wait a short while for Inspector to locate nearby WiFi networks.
• You can then switch to the Survey or Planning tab to create comprehensive, map-based analyses of your WiFi network's performance or simulate and plan your WiFi network's layout and coverage before physical implementation.

Price: Paid software (free trial available)

AirRadar uses GPS technology to create a constantly updated map of wireless networks that you can use to always find the strongest signal no matter where you are. AirRadar encourages its users to leave the app open on a laptop while walking around the city. As you walk with your laptop running AirRadar, the app detects all open wireless networks, remembers their location, and saves the information to an internal database.

When you later need to access the Internet, you can simply fire up AirRadar and look for the closest wireless network around you.

Beyond its mapping capabilities, AirRadar provides valuable insights for home network optimization. In densely populated areas where multiple WiFi signals overlap, AirRadar can help identify the least congested or even unused WiFi channels. It supports all modern WiFi standards, including 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, with expandability for future types.

Price: Paid software (free trial available)

iStat Menus is not a traditional WiFi scanner app, but rather a comprehensive system monitoring tool with excellent network monitoring capabilities. The latest version, iStat Menus 7, features an all-new design and hundreds of improvements that make it one of the most efficient and CPU-friendly system monitoring apps available for macOS.

At its core, iStat Menus is designed to live in the menu bar, providing quick access to a wealth of system information. The network monitoring functionality lets you keep track of all network connections with history graphs, current bandwidth usage, and a breakdown of bandwidth consumption by top apps. It also offers detailed connection information, including your public and private IP addresses.

You can try iStat Menus for up to 14 days. If you decide to buy, iStat Menus is available as a one-time purchase. However, a particularly attractive option for many users is its inclusion in Setapp, a subscription-based service for Mac apps. For $9.99 per month, Setapp subscribers gain access to iStat Menus along with over 250 other curated Mac apps,.

Price: $94.99

WiFi Scanner by AccessAgility is a paid macOS WiFi scanner that targets everyone from professionals interested in advanced technical information to homeowners who want to optimize their WiFi to achieve better performance and coverage.

This Mac WiFi scanner has been around for a while, and some earlier reviews are fairly critical, bringing the average review score down. The good news is that the developers have stepped up their game, and the latest version has been receiving much more positive feedback.

The latest version of WiFi Scanner offers a comprehensive set of features for analyzing and optimizing wireless networks. It supports the discovery of 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax access points and provides detailed information about network parameters such as SSID, signal level, MAC address, channel, and encryption type. The app also includes a speed testing feature for troubleshooting WiFi networks and an IP scanner to detect unknown devices connected to your network.

Still, WiFi Scanner is not nearly as polished as the best WiFi scanner for Mac, NetSpot, and it’s also very expensive, with no free trial version that potential buyers could use to evaluate the software.