Build network labs in your browser.
A distributed, API-first network emulator with a canvas you'll actually want to look at — and a free tier that's genuinely useful.
EVE-NG was free and ugly. Netplex is beautiful, distributed and worth paying for.
The old tools got you this far.
Netplex fixes the rest.
EVE-NG, PNETLAB, GNS3 and Containerlab are good tools we've all used. This is an honest scorecard — ✓ full, – partial, ✗ none.
| EVE-NG | PNETLAB | GNS3 | Containerlab | Netplex |
|---|
Migration is one click: import your .unl, .gns3project or containerlab YAML and keep building — no fixpermissions, no image juggling.
A topology you'll actually
want to look at.
Premium, flat, dark-first. Drag nodes, draw links in four styles, annotate, and watch live packet flow stream across the fabric — all on a circuit-board canvas built for engineers reading dense screens at 2am.
- Curve · Arc · Ortho · Straight links, parallel links fan out
- Live link flow — see traffic move, not invented Gbps numbers
- Export to SVG, PNG (2×) or JSON, Visio/draw.io-friendly
Recolour the entire app —
panels, canvas, nodes and all.
Three dark, three light. Every theme defines a complete token set, so the whole interface — not just the background — moves with it. Pick a UI accent too: orange, blue, green or magenta.
Two machines.
One topology.
The headline differentiator. A single lab spans several cheap PCs — Netplex stitches their virtual switches together with VXLAN tunnels, so a link between nodes on different machines just works. Big labs no longer need a big server.
- Scheduler places nodes by free CPU / RAM across hosts
- A host dropping degrades only its nodes — the lab keeps running
- Each host gets a colour; nodes glow to show where they live
The link doesn't care which machine a node lives on.
Drop an image. Walk away.
EVE-NG made you SSH in, juggle files and run fixpermissions. Netplex does the whole thing — convert, set permissions, organise, boot-test — and shows you every step. No CLI.
Auto-classify
Matches the upload against 138 device kinds across 67 vendors and gives it a human name — never vios-adventerprisek9-m.SPA…
Disk-guarded
Refuses an upload before it fills your disk: "Only 8.2 GB free — needs ≥10 GB." A precise, actionable message, never a stack trace.
Boot-tested
Every image boots headless before it's marked Ready. If it fails, you get what happened, why, and what to do — plus "email me the fix."
No PuTTY. No SecureCRT.
Just talk to your nodes.
Dockable, tabbed, tiled consoles right in the browser — pop them into their own window, theme them like your favourite terminal, and type once to send to every selected session.
- Group-send / broadcast across sessions
- 8 colour schemes, syntax highlighting, snippet bar
Everything the UI does
is an API call.
Drive Netplex from your own tooling. A documented REST + WebSocket API, a CLI, SDKs, and first-class infrastructure-as-code — the automation story EVE-NG never had.
Start free. Pay when you scale.
No artificial cripple-ware. The product is great at every tier — paid unlocks scale, teams and automation.
- 25 nodes · 3 labs
- Integrated consoles
- Read-only API
- Unlimited nodes & labs
- Up to 3 hosts (fabric)
- Full API · Terraform · Ansible
- Up to 10 hosts
- Multi-user editing
- Classroom mode (basic)
- Unlimited hosts + HA
- Full classroom + LMS
- SSO · audit · named contact
Students free with a school email · See full pricing →
Stop tolerating the old tools.
Import your EVE-NG lab, get Pro free for 60 days, and never run fixpermissions again.
Free forever for 25 nodes · no credit card