A good WiFi channel scanner app can reveal a lot of useful information about your wireless network and help you improve its performance. This article is intended for people who have never used a WiFi channel scanner app before. It explains what WiFi channel apps do and lists top 5 best WiFi channel scanner apps that you can download right now.
NetSpot is both an excellent WiFi channel scanner app and a WiFi survey tool. NetSpot features two distinct modes of operation: Discover and Survey. The Discover mode is what you need when you want to discover WiFi channel overlap.
When you activate it, NetSpot immediately analyzes all nearby wireless networks, gathers all available information about them, and presents its findings sorted as an intuitive list. You can then zoom in on individual wireless networks to learn more about them, or you can switch to the Survey mode and conduct a wireless signal strength site survey to discover dead zones. NetSpot is also one of the easiest WiFi analyzer apps to use, even though it’s used daily by countless network professionals around the world.
WiFi Scanner can scan for surrounding networks and supply vital WiFi information needed for troubleshooting purposes. The app allows users to narrow down the results using customizable filter options, it can plot 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz channel graphs to display WiFi channel overlap, and it even includes a handy speed test feature so you can test the performance of your network in various areas. The information you gather using WiFi scanner can be exported into CSV files, making it easy to share it with others.
Apart from WiFi networks, iStumbler can also find Bluetooth devices and Bonjour services. The app supports both the 2.4 GHz frequency range as well as the increasingly more popular 5 GHz frequency range. Unlike many other WiFi analyzer apps, iStumbler isn’t free. The app costs $9.99 for all the computers that you own, and you can purchase your license in the store or right in the app. iStumbler works on all Mac computers running macOS 10.10 (Yosemite) or later.
KisMAC is a free and open source wireless analysis and security auditing tool for macOS. It’s built upon the original KisMac, which was developed by Michael Rossberg and Geoffrey Kruse. Unfortunately, the original KisMac hasn’t been updated since 2011, so Vitalii Parovishnyk, the lead developer of the current iteration of KisMAC took over and continued from where Michael Rossberg and Geoffrey Kruse had stopped. KisMAC works on all versions of macOS from 10.9, and it features an updated user interface that makes the software easier to use than ever before.