Network Source of Truth

NetBox21.3k★

NetBox is the source of truth for network infrastructure and it won that position outright. Racks, devices, IP addresses, VLANs, circuits and cables all get modeled, and the API is good enough that most network automation tooling simply assumes NetBox is on the other end of it. Apache 2.0 and free to self-host, built on Python, Django and Postgres. Standing it up is straightforward. The actual work is discipline, because a source of truth is only true for as long as you keep it current. NetBox Labs sells NetBox Cloud and NetBox Enterprise across Starter, Professional and Premium tiers. Pricing is not published, so budget a sales conversation rather than a credit card. Solo and small teams: self-host, the community edition is complete. Large teams: price the cloud tiers against your own ops cost. The catch is not the software, it is the discipline. NetBox discovers nothing on its own. It documents what you tell it, and a stale source of truth is worse than none, because people carry on trusting it.

phpIPAM2.8k★

phpIPAM is the pragmatic IP address manager: subnets, VLANs, VRFs, a scanning agent that pings your ranges, and a web interface you can hand to a helpdesk without training anyone. It has been deployed across small and mid-size networks for over a decade. Free, PHP and MySQL, which means it installs on infrastructure most teams already run. The automatic subnet scanning is the practical draw, because it reconciles what you documented against what is actually answering on the network. That gap is usually larger than anyone expects. Small teams: this is the fastest route from a spreadsheet to real address management. Large teams already invested in NetBox: skip it, the overlap is not worth operating two sources of truth. The catch is licensing clarity. The repository ships no LICENSE file at all. The project presents itself as open source and is widely treated as such, but that is a gap worth confirming with the maintainers before you deploy it somewhere that will face a compliance review.

Nautobot1.6k★

Nautobot forked from NetBox in 2020 on a different bet: make the platform extensible enough that network automation runs inside it rather than alongside it. Jobs, a real plugin framework and a GraphQL API are the differences that actually matter. Apache 2.0, free, self-hosted, Python and Django. Anyone who has used NetBox will recognise the data model immediately, because that is where it started. The divergence shows up in the app ecosystem, where Nautobot apps handle things like golden configuration compliance and device onboarding. Network to Code, who maintain it, sell commercial support and hosted options on request rather than from a price list. Small teams: NetBox is the safer default, with a larger community and more third-party integrations. Teams already writing automation: the job framework saves you building a scheduler and a results store. The catch is the ecosystem gap. NetBox has more integrations, more plugins and more people who have already hit your exact problem. Choose Nautobot for the extensibility, not to follow the crowd.

NIPAP590★

NIPAP does IP address management and nothing else, which is precisely the argument for it. Large prefix lists stay fast, the search is genuinely good, and the CLI, web interface and API all treat the same data consistently. MIT licensed and free, Python with a Postgres backend, and no commercial tier of any kind. It has been quietly maintained for years by network engineers who wanted a spreadsheet replacement that would not turn into a full DCIM platform. Choose it when address planning is the actual problem. NetBox models racks, cables, circuits and devices, and if all you need is IPAM, most of that surface area is overhead you still have to maintain. Solo operators and small networks: lighter and faster to live in day to day. Large teams already running NetBox: no reason to add a second system. The catch is scope and pace. NIPAP will not model your hardware, and development moves slowly. Confirm it still fits your needs before building tooling that depends on its API.

Infrahub501★

Infrahub treats infrastructure data like source code: a graph database with branches, peer review and CI applied to your network model. Propose a change, review the diff, merge it. That is a materially different idea from the NetBox model of a system of record you edit in place. Apache 2.0 and free to self-host. OpsMill builds it and sells enterprise offerings alongside, quoted rather than listed. The versioning is the reason to look: you can stage a change across the whole model and see exactly what it touches before anything reaches a device. Small teams: NetBox is more mature and better supported. Teams whose network changes already run through a review process: this maps onto how you already work and removes a translation step between intent and record. The catch is age. Infrahub is early next to NetBox, the community is small and the plugin ecosystem barely exists yet. That is a real risk for something intended to be your source of truth, so pilot it properly before it becomes load-bearing.