Automated network documentation, honestly reviewed. No marketing fluff — just what you get when you deploy the daemon.

TL;DR

What it is: Open-source (AGPL-3.0) network documentation platform that scans your infrastructure, auto-discovers hosts and services, and generates a live topology diagram that updates on a schedule [README][1].
Who it’s for: Home lab enthusiasts drowning in stale draw.io exports, IT professionals maintaining multi-VLAN environments, MSPs who need to document client networks without manual upkeep, and DevOps teams mapping containerized services [README][homepage].
Cost savings vs. commercial tools: Scanopy self-hosted runs free on a $5–10/mo VPS. Alternatives like ManageEngine OpManager, Device42, or SolarWinds start at hundreds per month. Microsoft Visio adds another $5–10/seat/mo on top of that [pricing page][5].
Key strength: One-daemon deployment discovers 200+ service types including Docker containers automatically, then keeps the diagram live on a schedule. No agents on endpoints, no manual redraws [README][1].
Key weakness: AGPL-3.0 license carries source-disclosure obligations for anyone running it as a network service — more complex than MIT. Third-party review coverage is thin (the tool went public in late 2025), so long-term reliability data is limited [README][1].

What is Scanopy

Scanopy is a network documentation tool built around a single premise: you shouldn’t have to draw your network diagram. You should deploy a daemon, point it at a subnet, and let it draw the diagram for you — then keep it current automatically.

The pitch in the GitHub README is as plain as it gets: “Network documentation that updates itself. Scans your network, discovers hosts and services, and generates a live topology diagram that stays current automatically. One daemon, no per-device agents, no manual upkeep.” [README] The homepage adds one useful design decision: “No manual maintenance, no stale Visio files.” [homepage]

At its core, Scanopy has two moving parts: a daemon that runs network scans and a server that stores results and renders the UI. The daemon can be deployed anywhere on your network — one per VLAN for maximum coverage, or centrally with routing for simpler setups — and ships as a lightweight Docker image [README][1]. As of this review, the project sits at 4,317 GitHub stars, was built by a team in NYC, and has active CI pipelines for the daemon, server, and UI components [README].

The AGPL-3.0 license is worth understanding before you deploy. Free for all use, including commercial — but if you run Scanopy as a network service that others access, you’re required to disclose the source of any modifications. The README calls this out explicitly and offers a commercial license option (contact [email protected]) for organizations that can’t comply [README]. For a home lab or internal IT team, AGPL is rarely a problem. For an MSP building Scanopy into a client-facing product, read the license first.

Why people choose it

The core problem Scanopy solves has a name in every IT department: diagram drift. You draw the network once. The network evolves. The diagram doesn’t. Brandon Lee at VirtualizationHowto put it plainly: “You start out having good intentions and use something like draw.io to sketch out your switches, routers, VLANs, and servers, and everything looks good. Then the network evolves and changes. You add and remove things. The diagram quietly drifts out of date.” [1]

The standard answer to this problem has historically been either expensive enterprise tooling (ManageEngine OpManager, SolarWinds, Device42) or accepting that your docs are always six months behind. Scanopy is the first genuinely self-hostable tool in this category that non-enterprise teams can realistically deploy.

What separates it from just running Nmap and screenshotting the output:

It sees services, not just hosts. The 200+ service definitions mean that when Scanopy finds a host, it also identifies that it’s running PostgreSQL on 5432, nginx on 80, and a Portainer container — and renders all of that in the topology [README]. The Korben review quoted on the homepage captures this exactly: “It’s the network scan + Docker detection combo that makes it useful, because most tools do one or the other but never both.” [homepage]

The diagrams are interactive and live. Not a PNG export. Not a Mermaid sketch. VirtualizationHowto notes: “These don’t look like just rough diagrams or Mermaid sketches. The visuals are clean and modern.” [1] Community feedback on r/selfhosted and r/homelab echoes this — u/Medium_Chemist_4032 wrote: “So many features, wasn’t expecting a lot more than a simple scanner and a UI.” [homepage]

Scheduled scans keep documentation honest. The diagram isn’t a one-time snapshot — scans run on a schedule, so when you add a new server at 11pm and forget to document it, the next scan catches it [README][1].

The Reddit reception tells the honest story of who adopts this: home lab users who’ve been burned by stale docs. u/reinhart_menken: “It really helped me catch a couple things that were suboptimal, and be like ‘why is that there’, and tidy a couple things up.” u/blitz9826: “You’re literally doing the thing I’ve dreamed of for ages.” [homepage] These aren’t power users running enterprise network monitoring — they’re people who want a picture of their own network that’s actually current.

Features

Based on the README and first-hand descriptions from VirtualizationHowto [1]:

Discovery engine:

Scans networks to identify hosts, services, and relationships [README]
200+ service definitions — databases, web servers, containers, network infrastructure, monitoring tools, enterprise applications [README]
Docker container auto-discovery [README]
SNMP discovery (on paid cloud tiers) [pricing page]
Distributed scanning — deploy multiple daemons across network segments to map complex, multi-VLAN topologies [README][1]
Scheduled discovery to keep diagrams current without manual intervention [README]

Topology visualization:

Interactive network diagrams with customization options [README]
Version history — create branches, lock versions, compare network state over time [homepage]
Share via live view links, export as PNG (free), SVG (Starter+), Mermaid (Pro+), Confluence (Business+) [pricing page]
Embeddable diagrams for client portals (Pro+) [pricing page]
Watermark removed on paid tiers [pricing page]

Deployment options:

Docker Compose (two-command install) [README]
Proxmox LXC via community helper script [README]
Unraid community app [README][merged profile]
Three daemon strategies: one per VLAN (recommended), central with routing (default), or hybrid [1]

Team and access:

Multi-user support with role-based permissions (RBAC) [README][merged profile]
Additional seats on Business tier (+$8/seat/mo) [pricing page]
Audit logs and webhooks listed as “coming soon” on Business tier [pricing page]
API access on Pro+ [pricing page]
White labeling and custom SSO on Enterprise [pricing page]

What’s notably absent from community edition:

Scheduled discovery is cloud/paid only — the self-hosted community version requires manual trigger or the daemon’s default behavior [pricing page]
SNMP discovery is listed only on paid cloud tiers [pricing page]
Audit logs don’t exist yet even on Business (coming soon) [pricing page]

Pricing: SaaS vs self-hosted math

Scanopy Cloud (their SaaS):

Free: 1 seat, 1 network, 25 hosts max, no scheduled discovery, community support [pricing page]
Starter: $11.99/mo (billed yearly), unlimited hosts, scheduled discovery, shareable diagrams, email support [pricing page]
Pro: $39.99/mo (billed yearly), 3 networks (+ $8/network/mo), embeddable diagrams, API access, 14-day free trial [pricing page]
Business: $79.99/mo (billed yearly), 5 seats, 15 networks, Confluence export, priority support, 14-day free trial [pricing page]
Enterprise: Custom pricing, white labeling, custom SSO, managed deployment [pricing page]

The pricing model is flat-rate per tier, not per device. The homepage calls this out as a feature: “No per-device fees. Scale without surprises.” [homepage] That’s a meaningful difference from tools like ManageEngine OpManager or WhatsUp Gold that price per node.

Self-hosted (AGPL community edition):

Software: $0 [README]
VPS: $5–10/mo on Hetzner, Contabo, or DigitalOcean
Your time to deploy and maintain

What you give up self-hosting:

Scheduled discovery (based on pricing page, this is a paid-tier feature)
SNMP discovery
No watermark (Starter+ feature)
SVG/Mermaid/Confluence export formats (paid tiers)

Concrete comparison for an IT professional managing 5 client networks:

On Scanopy Cloud Business: $79.99/mo base + (5 additional networks × $6/mo) = ~$110/mo, or $1,320/year [pricing page].

Self-hosted on a $10 Hetzner VPS: $120/year for the infrastructure. The question is whether the paid-tier features you lose (scheduled discovery, export formats) matter for your workflow.

For a home lab user with one network, the self-hosted free tier is clearly the right call. For an MSP documenting 10+ client networks with a team, the Business tier math starts making sense — though you’d want to verify what “coming soon” audit logs and webhooks deliver before committing.

Data on enterprise alternatives for comparison: ManageEngine OpManager starts at $245/year for 25 devices (pricing data from Capterra category listing [5]). Scanopy’s unlimited-host model undercuts this significantly at scale.

Deployment reality check

The install path is deliberately simple. From the README:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/scanopy/scanopy/refs/heads/main/docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d

Two commands. UI accessible at http://<your-server-ip>:60072. [README] For Proxmox users, there’s a community helper script that creates an LXC container. Unraid users get it as a community app [README].

VirtualizationHowto [1] documents the deployment architecture decision you’ll need to make upfront: where to put the daemon. Three options:

One daemon per VLAN (recommended) — maximum discovery accuracy, each daemon can see everything on its segment
Central daemon with routing (default install) — works when all hosts are reachable from a single point, simpler to manage
Hybrid — mix and match depending on your topology

The choice matters because Scanopy can’t discover what the daemon can’t reach. If your VLANs are isolated by firewall rules, a single central daemon will miss devices on other segments [1].

What you actually need to run it:

A Linux host (physical, VM, or LXC) with Docker installed
Network access to the subnets you want to scan
Port 60072 accessible from your browser (or reverse proxy it behind nginx/Caddy for HTTPS)

What the README doesn’t spell out:

Resource requirements aren’t documented — for a home lab with <100 hosts, a 1-2 CPU/2GB RAM container should be fine; for enterprise-scale scanning, data not available
Database and persistence details aren’t prominent in the README — worth checking the installation guide at scanopy.net/docs before deploying [README]
The daemon and server are separate Docker images (mayanayza/scanopy-daemon and mayanayza/scanopy-server) — useful to know for network segmentation

Honest time estimate: A technically comfortable user following the Docker Compose path: 15–30 minutes to a working instance, first scan running. For someone unfamiliar with Docker: 1–2 hours with a guide, not including reverse proxy setup for HTTPS. For a Proxmox LXC via the helper script: probably faster than Docker for Proxmox users already comfortable with that workflow.

The project is young — GitHub shows active CI with separate pipelines for daemon, server, and UI, which is a good sign for an early-stage project [README]. The Discord is active. The concern is that the project hasn’t yet accumulated the years of production war stories that more established tools have.

Pros and cons

Pros

Actually solves diagram drift. The combination of auto-discovery plus scheduled re-scanning is the core value proposition, and users consistently report it works [1][homepage community quotes]. This is the problem that manual draw.io files will never solve.
Docker detection is first-class. Not a bolt-on — containerized services appear in the topology alongside physical/VM hosts [README]. Korben: “Most tools do one or the other but never both.” [homepage]
200+ service definitions out of the box. PostgreSQL, nginx, Portainer, and 200+ others auto-detected without configuration [README].
Multiple daemon deployment strategies. The VirtualizationHowto review [1] documents all three approaches — this flexibility matters for complex multi-VLAN environments that simpler tools can’t handle.
Clean, modern UI. Multiple independent sources call out the visual quality — VirtualizationHowto: “The visuals are clean and modern” [1]; homepage quote from IT-Connect calls it what teams have “dreamed of” [homepage].
Flat-rate cloud pricing. No per-device fees means the bill doesn’t explode as networks grow [pricing page].
Multiple deployment targets. Docker Compose, Proxmox LXC, Unraid — covers most home lab setups [README].
Version history. Branch and compare network states over time — genuinely useful for understanding how the network has changed [homepage].

Cons

AGPL-3.0, not MIT. Source-disclosure requirements apply if you offer Scanopy as a network service. MSPs or SaaS builders need to read the license carefully or buy the commercial license [README]. This is a harder constraint than it sounds for commercial use cases.
Scheduled discovery is a paid feature. On the self-hosted community edition, you get the scanner but the pricing page shows scheduled discovery as a Starter+ (paid cloud) feature [pricing page]. The practical impact on the open-source version needs verification against the actual codebase.
Thin third-party review coverage. The project went public in late 2025. One substantive third-party review exists (VirtualizationHowto [1]), and the rest are passing mentions. You’re making a bet on a young project without the years of community feedback that n8n, Netdata, or Grafana have.
Audit logs and webhooks are “coming soon.” The Business tier lists these as features, but they don’t exist yet [pricing page]. Don’t make a purchasing decision based on roadmap features.
No documented resource requirements. The README and docs don’t surface memory/CPU recommendations, which matters if you’re fitting this into a crowded homelab server.
SNMP discovery is cloud-tier only. If you have managed switches and SNMP is how you discover your infrastructure, that’s a paid-tier feature [pricing page].
Multi-network Pro pricing adds up. The Pro tier is $39.99/mo for 3 networks, but additional networks are $8/mo each. Ten networks on Pro = $39.99 + 7 × $8 = $95.99/mo, which starts competing with self-hosted-on-decent-VPS territory [pricing page].

Who should use this / who shouldn’t

Use Scanopy if:

You’re a home lab user with 1–3 networks who wants accurate documentation without maintaining it manually. The self-hosted free tier covers this completely.
You’re an IT professional managing physical/virtual infrastructure across multiple subnets and your current documentation is “a Visio file from 2022 that’s probably wrong.”
You want Docker container visibility in the same diagram as your physical hosts — this is genuinely uncommon in free tools.
You can live with AGPL-3.0 (or want to buy the commercial license) and Docker is already in your stack.
A 15-minute setup investment sounds worth it to never manually update a network diagram again.

Pause before deploying if:

You need SNMP discovery for managed switches — verify whether this works in self-hosted before committing, as it’s listed as a paid cloud feature [pricing page].
You’re an MSP planning to build this into a client-facing product — the AGPL terms require legal review first, and the commercial license path exists for a reason [README].
You need audit logs today — they’re not available yet even on paid tiers [pricing page].
You’re in a regulated environment that requires SOC 2 or equivalent — no compliance documentation visible for self-hosted; cloud tier compliance status unclear.

Skip it if:

You need enterprise network monitoring (performance metrics, alerting, SNMP traps, flow analysis) — Scanopy is documentation tooling, not monitoring. It tells you what’s there, not whether it’s healthy.
Your primary concern is security scanning and vulnerability discovery — use Nmap, OpenVAS, or Greenbone for that. Scanopy maps topology; it doesn’t audit security posture.
You’re a non-technical user with no Docker experience and no one to help deploy it — the install is simple but still requires a terminal.

Alternatives worth considering

For automated network mapping (Scanopy’s direct category):

Netdisco — open source, SNMP-based, strong for managed switches and enterprise environments. Older project, less polished UI, but battle-tested in large networks. Free.
LibreNMS — primarily a monitoring tool, but includes auto-discovery and topology maps. More complex to set up, more features overall. AGPL.
Observium — network monitoring and topology, strong SNMP support, community edition free. Less modern UI than Scanopy.
Nmap — the raw scanner underneath many of these tools. Free, powerful, CLI-only. You get data, not diagrams.

For manual diagramming you’re trying to escape:

draw.io / diagrams.net — free, excellent diagramming. Manual. The problem you’re solving.
Netbox — open source DCIM/IPAM. Excellent for inventory and physical infrastructure documentation, but you enter data manually. Different problem space than Scanopy.

For commercial automated documentation:

Device42 — powerful, auto-discovery, full ITAM. Priced for enterprise (thousands per year). Capterra lists it at $0 free version but enterprise pricing [5].
ManageEngine OpManager — per-device pricing, monitoring + mapping. Starts accessible, scales expensively [5].
SolarWinds Network Topology Mapper — accurate, mature, Windows-only, paid.

For a home lab or small IT team, the realistic shortlist is Scanopy vs. LibreNMS. Choose Scanopy if you want a modern UI and zero-config topology generation. Choose LibreNMS if you also need performance monitoring and SNMP-driven discovery of network gear.

For MSPs evaluating automated client documentation, Scanopy’s Business tier pricing competes with parts of the ManageEngine and PRTG stacks, but the “coming soon” audit logs and webhooks are gaps worth noting before signing contracts with clients.

Bottom line

Scanopy solves a specific, universal problem — the network diagram that’s always six months out of date — and it solves it in the cleanest self-hosted package currently available. One Docker Compose file, a 15-minute setup, and you have a live topology that discovers Docker containers alongside physical hosts and keeps itself current on a schedule. The GitHub reception (4,317 stars for a late-2025 project) and community quotes suggest it’s doing what it claims.

The honest caveats: it’s young, AGPL rather than MIT, scheduled discovery may be limited in the free self-hosted edition, and third-party review coverage is thin. The pricing tiers are reasonable but the “coming soon” features on Business tier mean you’re buying a roadmap promise for the higher tiers.

For a home lab user or small IT team, this is an easy call — deploy it free, see your network drawn for you, and stop maintaining a diagram manually. For commercial deployments, read the AGPL terms and wait for audit logs to ship before betting client contracts on it.

If deploying the daemon is the blocker, upready.dev handles exactly this kind of one-time infrastructure setup.

Sources

Brandon Lee, VirtualizationHowto — “Stop Drawing Network Diagrams Manually — Scanopy Does It for You” (December 22, 2025). https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2025/12/stop-drawing-network-diagrams-manually-scanopy-does-it-for-you/
noted.lol — “Scanopy: Self-Hosted Network Scanner That Builds a Live Topology Map” (March 3, 2026). https://noted.lol/memos/ (linked in “Read Next” section)
Clayton Errington — “Week Notes - W10” (March 6, 2026). https://claytonerrington.com/blog/2026-w10/
Ethan Sholly, selfh.st — “Self-Host Weekly (9 January 2026)”. https://selfh.st/weekly/2026-01-09/
Capterra — “Free Network Mapping Software” (directory listing). https://www.capterra.in/directory/30978/network-mapping/pricing/free/software

Primary sources:

GitHub repository and README: https://github.com/scanopy/scanopy (4,317 stars, AGPL-3.0)
Official website and homepage: https://scanopy.net
Pricing page: https://scanopy.net (pricing section)
Documentation: https://scanopy.net/docs
Live demo: https://demo.scanopy.net

Features

Authentication & Access

Multi-User Support
Role-Based Access Control

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