Tools I Actually Use

The go-to tool for packet analysis and network troubleshooting. Essential for understanding what's actually happening on your network. Free, open source, and works on all major platforms. I use it daily for debugging network issues and security analysis.

Legendary network scanning tool used for host discovery, port scanning, and service detection. Completely free and open source. Essential for security assessments and network inventory. Powerful scripting engine for automated scanning.

The world's most used penetration testing framework. Community edition is completely free and includes thousands of exploit modules. Great for learning security testing and vulnerability assessment. Industry standard tool.

Free alternative to Burp Suite Pro for web security testing. Actively maintained by OWASP with automated scanners and manual testing tools. Great for finding XSS, SQL injection, and other web vulnerabilities. 100% free and open source.

Open source IDS/IPS that monitors network traffic in real-time. Can detect thousands of attack patterns and anomalies. Free to use and highly customizable with rule-based detection. Industry standard for network security monitoring.

Automatically ban IPs that show malicious signs like too many password failures. Essential security tool that monitors log files and takes action. Open source and lightweight. Saves you from brute force attacks and credential stuffing. Works with SSH, web servers, mail servers, and more.

Advanced open source threat detection engine. More modern than Snort with multi-threading support. Can operate as IDS, IPS, or just network security monitoring. Free and actively developed. Great for detecting sophisticated attacks and monitoring network traffic.

Hands down the best free hypervisor. Combines KVM virtualization and LXC containers in one platform. Web-based management, clustering, backups, and more - all completely free. I run my entire home lab on Proxmox. Enterprise features without the enterprise cost.

The standard for containerization. Makes deploying and managing applications incredibly easy with portable containers. Free and open source with huge community support. Essential skill for modern infrastructure and development.

Agentless automation tool that uses SSH to configure systems. Write playbooks in YAML to automate everything from server setup to application deployment. 100% free and open source. Much simpler than alternatives like Puppet or Chef.

Declarative infrastructure as code tool that works with all major cloud providers. Define your infrastructure in code and version control it. Free and open source. Industry standard for managing cloud infrastructure programmatically.

Industry-leading backup for VMs. Community edition is free and supports up to 10 workloads. Reliable, fast backups with instant VM recovery. Free version is perfect for home labs and small deployments. Professional-grade backup without the cost.

Powerful home automation hub that connects thousands of devices and services. Runs locally on your hardware with complete privacy control. Open source with huge community and add-on ecosystem. Great for automating infrastructure monitoring and notifications. Free forever.

Beautiful web interface for managing Docker containers and swarms. Community edition is completely free. Makes container management so much easier than CLI alone. Deploy stacks, manage images, view logs, and access container shells. Essential if you run Docker.

Kubernetes stripped down to the essentials. Uses 40% less memory than standard k8s. Perfect for edge, IoT, and home labs. Fully certified Kubernetes with automatic TLS and simple deployment. Open source from Rancher. Great way to learn Kubernetes without massive resource requirements.

The monitoring solution I use daily at work. Raw edition is completely open source and incredibly powerful. Monitors servers, networks, applications, and more. Auto-discovery makes setup easy. Great dashboards and alerting. Free and scales well.

Beautiful real-time monitoring with zero configuration. Install in seconds and get instant insights into system performance. Open source and completely free. Low resource usage with gorgeous dashboards. Perfect for monitoring servers and containers.

The best tool for creating dashboards from any data source. Open source and free with beautiful visualizations. Works with Prometheus, InfluxDB, and dozens of other sources. Industry standard for metrics visualization.

Open source monitoring and alerting toolkit. Collects metrics from services via HTTP. Perfect for microservices and cloud-native apps. Free and pairs perfectly with Grafana. CNCF graduated project with huge community.

Mature open source monitoring platform for large-scale infrastructure. Monitors networks, servers, cloud, applications, and services. Completely free with enterprise features like distributed monitoring and SLA reporting. Great Nagios alternative.

The original open source monitoring system, still going strong. Monitors services, hosts, and network equipment. Core version is completely free. Huge plugin ecosystem. More complex to set up but extremely flexible and reliable.

Modern, lightweight monitoring system with a beautiful web interface. Tracks CPU, memory, disk, network, and Docker containers. Incredibly easy to deploy with minimal resource usage. Open source alternative to commercial monitoring dashboards. Perfect for home labs and small infrastructure.

Centralized log management that actually scales. Open source alternative to Splunk. Powerful search, alerting, and dashboards. Free version has no daily log limit. Great for security monitoring and troubleshooting. Handles logs from any source.

The best place to start learning cybersecurity. Free tier includes tons of guided rooms and challenges. Learn by doing with in-browser labs. Great structured learning paths from beginner to advanced. Gamified with ranks and badges.

Retired machines are free to practice on. Great for intermediate to advanced security skills. Active community and writeups. More challenging than THM. Free tier includes Starting Point path and retired labs. Industry-recognized platform.

Completely free wargames to learn security concepts. Start with Bandit for Linux basics, progress to more advanced challenges. Each level teaches a new concept. Great for learning command line and security fundamentals. 100% free, no accounts needed for basic levels.

Free CTF competition originally created for high school students but great for all levels. Practice problems available year-round. Learn reverse engineering, web exploitation, forensics, and more. Completely free educational resource.

Huge collection of free vulnerable VMs to practice penetration testing. Download and run in your own lab. Great for OSCP preparation. Community-contributed machines with varying difficulty levels. Completely free.

Completely free video courses for CompTIA certifications (A+, Network+, Security+). High-quality content that rivals paid courses. I used these to study for Security+. Also offers free study groups and course notes. All 100% free.

Free interactive training for web security from the makers of Burp Suite. Covers everything from SQL injection to advanced topics. Hands-on labs for every vulnerability type. Completely free with no time limits. Better than most paid courses. Essential for learning web application security.

The most popular web server and reverse proxy. Free, open source, and extremely fast. Great for load balancing, SSL termination, and serving static content. I use it for all my web infrastructure. More efficient than Apache for most use cases.

Get free SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt in seconds. Open source and automated renewal. No reason to pay for SSL anymore. Works with most web servers. Essential for any modern website. Completely free with automated renewals.

The most reliable open source load balancer. Used by the world's busiest websites. Free and incredibly fast. Great for high availability setups. More features than you'll ever need. Battle-tested in production environments.

Perfect for microservices and Docker environments. Automatic service discovery and zero-config SSL. Open source and modern approach to reverse proxying. Great for dynamic container environments. Integrates beautifully with Docker and Kubernetes.

Modern web server with automatic HTTPS out of the box. Zero-config SSL certificates from Let's Encrypt. Open source, fast, and incredibly simple to configure. Great for reverse proxying and serving static sites. Much easier config than Nginx while being just as powerful.

Battle-tested web server that powers huge portions of the internet. Open source since 1995. Different approach than Nginx - uses processes instead of events. Extensive module ecosystem. .htaccess support makes it flexible. Still the standard for many hosting providers.

The editor I use for everything. Free, fast, and has extensions for every language and framework. Built-in Git integration, debugging, and terminal. Works on all platforms. Remote development over SSH is amazing. Can't recommend enough.

Essential skill for any developer or sysadmin. Free and open source. Learn this - it's non-negotiable for modern work. Works with GitHub, GitLab, and any Git hosting. Track changes, collaborate, and never lose work again.

The standard tool for API testing. Free tier is generous and includes most features. Test REST APIs, save requests in collections, write automated tests. Great UI and makes API work much easier. Essential for web development.

Best terminal emulator for Mac. Free and packed with features: split panes, search, autocomplete, and more. Huge quality-of-life improvements over default Terminal. Highly customizable. If you use Mac, get this.

Keep terminal sessions running even when disconnected. Split windows, multiple panes, persistent sessions. Free and open source. Essential for remote server work. Takes time to learn but worth it for productivity on the command line.

Terminal UI that makes Git actually enjoyable to use. Stage files, create commits, resolve merge conflicts, all with simple keyboard shortcuts. Open source and incredibly fast. Works in any terminal. Once you try it, you won't want to use git CLI the old way.

Official GitHub tool for working with pull requests, issues, and repos from the command line. Open source from GitHub. Create PRs, check CI status, merge, all without leaving the terminal. Way faster workflow than using the web interface.