Build real networks
on your own computer.
netplex runs real routers, switches and firewalls in your browser. Draw your network, press play, and it works like the real thing. Here is everything it does: the canvas, the consoles, adding images, the toolbox, the AI helper and the network wiring underneath - plus Cluster, which is on the roadmap.
Professional: your lab tells you what's wrong, and the AI can fix it via MCP with your approval.
A topology you'll actually
want to look at.
Drag, drop and connect. Every device is a clean Halo card with its own icon inside, in the accent colour you pick. Choose straight, curved or right-angled links, tidy everything with one-click auto-layout, add notes and shapes, then switch to presentation mode and draw on your lab while you explain it.
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
- Presentation mode - laser, pen, arrows, shapes & spotlight over your live topology · Professional
Recolour the entire app -
panels, canvas, nodes and all.
A gradual ladder - two light, four dark, Mist through Midnight, with Carbon as the default. Every theme defines a complete token set, so the whole interface - not just the background - moves with it. Then pick any of ten UI accents.
Every device.
One clean look.
Router, switch, server and cloud gateway - the same flat card every time, with the device's own icon inside, in the accent colour you pick.
Draw links your way.
Curve, Arc, Ortho or Straight - then tap, shape, isolate or watch every protocol crossing them.
Watch only the protocols
you care about.
Watch a link glow the moment OSPF says hello or LLDP finds a neighbour. Pick the protocols you care about - CDP, LLDP, BGP, STP and around sixty more, each in its own colour - and let the rest stay quiet. It's the quickest way to see what your network is really doing.
Pick which protocols light up the live flow on your links. Type a name in the search bar - lldp, is-is, vrrp - choose it from the list, and it becomes a coloured chip. Remove a chip with its ×, or clear the whole filter in one click.
- A built-in list of well-known protocols - CDP, LLDP, STP, IS-IS, OSPF, BGP, VRRP / HSRP, DNS, SSH and many more - each with its own colour
- Set it in Settings, or per link from the link's Flow tab
- Nothing selected means the flash overlay stays off - it is opt-in, protocol by protocol
- OSPF, BGP and IS-IS can be narrowed further to one message type, such as Hello or Update
- Need a protocol that is not listed? Add it once in Settings and it shows up in the search everywhere
- The packet-capture console uses the same list to build its filter for you
Drop an image. Walk away.
Copy an image in and it simply works. netplex gives every file the right ownership and access on its own, so you never open an SSH session just to run a fix-up script again.
Copy an image into the uploads folder - over SCP, SFTP or straight onto the disk. Seconds after it lands, netplex recognises it, files it in your Library and gets it ready to use. No scan button, no hunting for settings. And if something can't be imported, it tells you why, in plain words.
No more SSH-ing in, juggling files and running 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 hundreds of built-in device profiles 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 gets a headless boot check right after import - Ready doesn't wait on it, but if it fails you get what happened, why, and what to do, not a stack trace.
Bring your own licensed images.
We handle the rest.
FRR routers, VyOS, Open vSwitch, Nokia SR Linux and Alpine hosts are one click away. Drag one onto the canvas and netplex fetches it for you the first time you use it. Bring your own vendor images whenever you're ready.
From core routers to next-gen firewalls and white-box NOS. Alpine MicroVM ships free and built-in; vendor images are user-provided, and the pipeline classifies, converts and boot-tests them automatically.
All vendor names and marks belong to their respective owners and are shown to indicate supported device definitions only.
Open every device's console right in your browser.
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.
- Broadcast mode - type once, send to all consoles
- 30 colour schemes, snippet bar
Everything the UI does
is an API call.
Drive netplex. from your own tooling. A full REST + WebSocket API, an MCP server for AI agents, API keys, a CLI, a Python SDK, CI-ready lab tests and lab-as-code plan/apply straight from Git - AI tokens are read-only on Associate and Professional; write access and plan/apply over MCP need Architect.
Your AI assistant can drive it too.
netplex speaks MCP, the open standard AI tools use to take action. Connect an MCP-compatible assistant such as Claude Code and ask it to build a lab, start devices, run commands or check that routing has settled - with read-only mode and confirmations keeping you firmly in control.
Alongside the REST API, netplex. ships a real MCP server - the same protocol Claude and other MCP-compatible AI agents use to act on live systems, not just describe what they'd do. Point one at a running lab and it can see the topology, read live configs and CLI output, and run commands.
- 80+ MCP tools (beta) - build, wire and power labs, read topology, run CLI commands, and pull real link/interface evidence to debug a lab, not just build it
- Scoped tokens generated from the app - works with any MCP-compatible agent, no shared secrets
- Read-only operator tools (
show,ping,get_mac_table...) hold no write capability at all - an AI can verify a lab without ever being able to change it - Server-enforced "ask first" - a switch on the server, not a client toggle, so no MCP client can bypass it
Every lab keeps its own history (git).
netplex can back your lab up as a git history on a remote you own (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or your own server). Compare any two versions side by side and roll back with one click.
On Professional, netplex lab pull gives you a real folder: one YAML topology file, one plain-text config per device, a README. Edit a device's config in any editor and git diff shows the lines that changed - not a blob. On Professional, netplex lab plan previews every change (what's added, changed, deleted, what restarts, what's destructive) before netplex lab push applies it - a hash-locked plan, not a blind write.
- A deterministic lint finds duplicate MACs, duplicate IPs, unwired ports and dead hosts - no LLM required
- One-click setup connects Claude (the only client we've tested end to end) or any other MCP-compatible agent to the same pull/plan/push flow
The questions people actually ask
Straight answers, not marketing copy.
- Does it work with any LLM, or just one vendor's? Any MCP client, in principle. Claude Code is the only client we've actually tested end to end; other MCP-compatible agents should work the same way but haven't been individually verified yet.
- Is there a maintained MCP server I can actually run? Yes - it ships with netplex and is versioned. It is still in beta.
- Can it deploy AND destroy from declarative YAML, like Terraform? Yes - hash-locked
plan/apply, destructive-change detection, andapplyof an empty topology is a real destroy. - Is there training or docs, or do I figure it out myself? A real 10-minute tutorial, not a roadmap promise.
Not a chat window. A real way for AI to do the work.
80+ MCP tools (beta), scoped tokens, live topology access - point any MCP-compatible agent at it and watch.
A single seat. The whole toolbox.
Add delay, jitter, packet loss or a bandwidth limit to any link - live, without restarting a thing. Turn a clean lab into a congested WAN in seconds and find out how your design really holds up.
Professional holds nothing back. There's no reason to cripple a single-seat licence - you get every automation surface we ship.
Make any cable slow or flaky
Add delay, uneven delay, lost, damaged or doubled packets, and a speed limit to any cable - just like a real long-distance link.
Any topology, saved as code
Build AWS VPC, SD-WAN multi-site, hub-and-spoke - anything - on the free-form canvas, then save it as portable .npx. One-click starter templates for common topologies are in development.
MicroVM nodes · beta
Firecracker MicroVMs for lightweight Linux nodes (Kata support is built but not yet verified). Alpine ships free and built-in; build your own Ubuntu image.
IPv6 labs
IPv6 works between your nodes over the L2 fabric; what runs (OSPFv3, BGP4+, SLAAC, SRv6) is whatever your node images support. First-class dual-stack tooling - lab templates, canvas labels and an IPv6 NAT gateway - is in development (see the roadmap).
Let your AI assistant lend a hand
Connect an MCP-compatible assistant such as Claude Code to build a lab, start devices and run commands - with read-only mode and confirmations keeping you in control.
Everything else netplex does.
Wireshark, right in your browser
Click any cable and watch the packets go by. Open any packet to see what is inside. Nothing to install.
Packet list: every plan · full Wireshark window: Professional
Freeze points and branches
Save the whole lab at one moment. Go back to it later, or start a new lab from that moment.
Professional
Push your own code
One command turns your project folder into a device on the canvas - from your terminal, a VS Code task or a git commit.
Every plan · 1 image on Associate, 10 on Professional
Watch the AI work
A strip at the top shows what your AI assistant just did, and the device it touched flashes on the canvas.
Every plan
Network Scanner
A scanner device that finds every host and open port in your lab - handy to check a firewall.
Professional
Export to your own tools
SSH config, hosts file or Nornir inventory - or a draw.io, Mermaid or Graphviz diagram.
Every plan
Restore centre
Bring back a lab you deleted or an older version of a lab - or save a snapshot of the whole server.
Every plan
Scheduled backups
Back up on a timer to your own SSH or SMB server, or to cloud storage.
Every plan
Edit as a drawing or as text
A code panel shows your lab as text. Change the text and the drawing updates; change the drawing and the text updates.
Every plan
Change cables while it runs
Add a cable, or pause one to fake a broken link, without stopping the lab.
Every plan
Start-up configs
Paste a config that a device loads the first time it starts, and keep named sets of start-up configs to switch between.
Every plan
Desktops in your browser
Open a Windows or Linux desktop inside your lab (RDP or VNC) in a browser tab.
Every plan
Host dashboard
See how busy your computer is, with history and alerts when something runs low.
Every plan
Multicast tools
A multicast sender and a multicast receiver you drop on the canvas, to test group traffic across your routers.
Professional
Read-only share link
Give a colleague or a teacher a link to watch your lab live. They can look, but not change anything.
Professional
Recently deleted labs
Deleted a lab by mistake? It waits for three days, and you can bring it back with one click.
Every plan
Tags on devices
Put coloured tags on devices, such as core or branch, so a big lab stays easy to read.
Every plan
Real network wiring inside.
Under the hood, netplex runs on the same open-source foundations network engineers have relied on for years: QEMU and KVM for virtual machines, Docker for containers, and Open vSwitch for every link. Rock-solid at the core - everything we've added sits on top.
Every link in a lab is a real Open vSwitch/veth wire, not a simulation - so traffic you capture, shape or break is genuinely happening on the host's kernel network stack.
- Clean cables - netplex never sends its own traffic into your network
- Every engine - QEMU, Docker, LXC, MicroVM, namespaces, Dynamips and IOL - on the same fabric, on every tier
The link doesn't care which machine a node lives on.
See it on your own machine.
Start on the free Associate tier, import an EVE-NG lab, and explore the whole platform in minutes.