MacPing for Mac
Ping lots of hosts at once. Each one gets a tile that turns green when it answers, yellow when replies start going missing and red when it's down.
For Mac · macOS 14 or later · No admin password needed · Installs with Homebrew · Open source
What it does
Your router, your servers, the sites you look after. Put them all in one window and see straight away when something stops answering.
01
Type a host name or IP address and press Return. Each tile shows a live log of replies with their times, and underneath, how many were sent and lost, the average and the range. Green is up. Yellow means replies are going missing, but not enough in a row to call it down. Red is down: by default two lost in a row, and you can choose how many.
02
Paste a list, or drop a text file of hosts on the window. Type host:port, such as example.com:443, to check that a service is answering, not just the machine. IPv4 and IPv6 both work. Drag tiles to reorder them, and let the grid fit the window or pick a number of columns.
03
See every router between your Mac and a host, with names and times. Start one from a tile's ⋯ menu or the top bar, and run several side by side.
04
Status history lists every time a host went down or came back, and when you started or stopped one. Filter it by kind or host, then export it as CSV, or tab- or space-separated text.
05
The menu bar icon shows how many hosts are down, in red. Click it for a list of every host with its latest time. Close the window and MacPing keeps pinging up there.
06
Choose how often to ping, how long to wait for a reply, and how many lost in a row count as down. Set the TTL and packet size, keep the window on top, open at login, and start blank, with your last hosts or with a favourite. Hosts given on the command line are pinged straight away.
And the little things
Small details that make it easy to live with every day.
MacPing sends real ICMP echo requests, like the ping command, using the unprivileged ICMP sockets macOS gives every app. No helper tool, and no ping running behind the scenes.
A notification and a sound when a host goes down or comes back, and an optional log file with a line for each change.
Give hosts friendly names, like Office router, to show on tiles, in alerts and in the history.
Save a set of hosts, with a column layout, and load it again in one click.
Check for updates in Settings. MacPing quits, updates through Homebrew and reopens.
Built in SwiftUI with no Electron. Light and dark mode, and a ping-pong ball that smiles while everything's up and frets when something's down.
Take a look
The window and the menu bar panel share the same colourful style, in light and dark.
Private by design
Your hosts, aliases and favourites are kept on your Mac. The status history stays in memory until you export it.
MacPing only contacts the hosts you add, after looking up their names. It checks for updates only when you press Check for updates.
No analytics, no accounts and nothing collected. It's open source, so you can check.
MacPing is free. It installs with Homebrew, a free and widely used tool for installing Mac apps and keeping them up to date. You only need to set it up once.
Get Homebrew. Download the installer, open it and click through, like any Mac installer. It asks for your Mac password. Already have Homebrew? Skip to step 2.
Download HomebrewOpen Terminal, an app that comes with every Mac. Press ⌘ Space, type Terminal and press Return. A window with a blinking cursor opens.
Click Copy, paste into Terminal with ⌘ V and press Return. Text scrolls past while Homebrew installs MacPing. It's done when it stops.
$ brew tap RossNicholson/tap$ brew trust --cask rossnicholson/tap/macping$ brew install --cask macping
See command not found: brew? Quit Terminal with ⌘ Q, open it again and paste once more.
Open MacPing from your Applications folder. If your Mac asks whether you're sure you want to open it, click Open. Then type a host name or IP address in a tile and press Return.
Your Mac checks with you before an app can do certain things. Here's what MacPing asks for, and what to click.
On an older Homebrew, an error about brew trust is safe to ignore.
MacPing is free, open source, and signed and notarized by Apple.
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Also from me: Repo Radar, every repo with work you haven't pushed, and BrewDock, Homebrew in your menu bar
MacPing is an independent app and isn't affiliated with or endorsed by vmPing, its author or Homebrew.