Zenmap is a free and open-source GUI designed to be used with Nmap. Zenmap is a multiplatform tool that supports Linux, Ubuntu, Mint, Kali, Fedora, CentOS,.., Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, etc. . .nmap is a very powerful tool for network scanning and vulnerability discovery but it is completely command-line based. Zenmap can be used by novice users to scan the network and discover vulnerabilities.
Download Zenmap For Windows
Windows version can be downloaded from the following link. After downloading this link you can easily install just clicking on the executable Next and Next steps.
https://nmap.org/dist/nmap-7.91-setup.exe
But keep in mint that more recent versions can be downloaded from the following page Microsoft Binaries Section .
https://nmap.org/download.html
Download Zenmap For Linux
Zenmap can be downloaded for different Linux distributions from following links.
Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali Packages
The zenmap can be installed for deb or apt based distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali with the following command. Following command will also install the nmap if it is not installed previosuly. Because the nmap is the dependecy for zenmap package.
$ sudo apt install zenmap
Fedora, RHEL, CentOS
For RPM or yum based distributions like Fedora, RHEL or CentOS following command can be used to install zenmap.
$ sudo yum install zenmapDownload Zenmap For MacOS X
nmap MacOS X built provides the Zenmap GUI by default. So downloading the following nmap dmg package will also provide the Zenmap.
https://nmap.org/dist/nmap-7.70.dmg
Zenmap GUI
Zenmap is GUI form of nmap and provides some input areas for parameters.
Targetis the remote target we want to scan. We can put a single of multiple targets like Nmap.- The profile is the scan options like speed and detail which is preconfigured as Intense Scan in this example.
- The command is the command which will run in the command line and created with the given parameters.
Scanwill start the scan process.
Zenmap Portable Edition
As Nmap is a network scanner that requires privileges to install wincap or similar libraries to capture we need some rights to install and run it. So there is no Zenmap portable version that works properly.
Zenmap vs Nmap Commandline
Zenmap is just a GUI form that can be used by novice users. It completely uses Nmap command-line tool. So they do not have similarities or differences. They just complete each other.
Zenmap Commands
As Zenmap is a GUI tool it doesn’t provide any command-line support and just a form to convert given options to the Nmap command-line options.
From the scan result with the Zenmap we can see that the output is colored. Ports numbers and lines are colored as green and other lines are printed black. Also the URLs or domains are printed as blue. Port related results like version, script scan result, vulnerability etc printed under the port lines and depicted with pipes and underscores.
Zenmap vs Nmap
Zenmap is a sub project of the Nmap in order to provide graphical user interface. But generally their are compared each other because their name and their interface is different. Even it is not complete we will compare them from user point of view.
| ZENMAP | NMAP |
|---|---|
| Provide GUI (Graphical User Interface) | Provide CLI (Command Line Interface) |
| Uses nmap under the hood | There is no extra tool |
| Create nmap commands according to user input | User provides the parameters manually |
| Compare multiple scans for differences | Requires diff or ndiff to compare scan differences |
| Provide a graphical presentation of hosts and ports | No graphical presentation |