NetBox is a web application that acts as the central reference, what its authors call a source of truth, for everything that makes up a network infrastructure: IP address plans, racks, devices, cables, carrier circuits and virtual machines. Jeremy Stretch wrote it in 2015 while working as a network engineer at DigitalOcean, to automate the hosting company’s provisioning, and it was released as open source in June 2016. Development is now led by the company NetBox Labs together with a team of volunteer maintainers, and the community edition is still distributed under the Apache 2.0 licence.
What NetBox is for
The starting idea is straightforward: rather than documenting the network in scattered spreadsheets, you describe in NetBox what the network should look like, and your automation tools read that description. The data model covers two broad areas. The IPAM side handles IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes, VRFs, VLANs and AS numbers. The DCIM side describes sites, racks with their elevation view, devices and their modules, cabling and power distribution. On top of that come circuits and their providers, wireless networks, VPN tunnels with IKE and IPsec policies, L2VPN overlays and virtual machines grouped into clusters.
Every object can carry custom fields, tags and validation rules specific to the organisation. Each change is logged, so you always know who altered what and when. Access happens through a browser, but also through a REST API and a GraphQL API, which are the real heart of the tool: an Ansible playbook, a Nornir script or a continuous integration pipeline can query NetBox to generate device configurations. A plugin system extends the model, and the community has produced a great many plugins.
It helps to place NetBox correctly among the other tools in this category. It monitors nothing in real time, polls no SNMP counters and sends no alerts: that is the job of LibreNMS, which discovers what actually exists, whereas NetBox describes what ought to exist. Nor does it replace a DNS server, a RADIUS server or a configuration management tool, and the documentation says so plainly. The two approaches often complement each other, and many teams compare the NetBox inventory with what their monitoring discovers in order to spot discrepancies.
Who is it for?
NetBox is built for network teams at companies, carriers, hosting providers and data centres, especially once several people need to share reliable documentation or deployments are to be automated. Students and hobbyists also use it to learn how a network is modelled properly.
Its limits come mostly from how demanding it is. The tool is only worth something if the data entered is accurate and kept current, which takes discipline, and it discovers nothing on its own without an extra plugin or script. On the technical side, it is a Django application that, according to the documentation, needs Python 3.12 to 3.14, PostgreSQL 15 or later and Redis 6.0, all on a Linux server behind nginx or Apache. For a small home network, a spreadsheet remains quicker. If what you mainly want is to see the state of your links and devices, LibreNMS or ntopng will serve you better.
Download NetBox safely
The community edition is downloaded from the releases page of the netbox-community/netbox repository on GitHub, where version 4.7.1 was published on 15 September 2026. The installation documentation, hosted on netboxlabs.com, describes the standard setup from the release archive or a Git clone, and notes that a Python package exists as an experiment since version 4.7, not recommended for production. A Docker image is maintained by the community in the netbox-community/netbox-docker repository, built from the official releases.
Alongside this, NetBox Labs sells two commercial offerings: NetBox Cloud, hosted and operated by the company, with a free tier mentioned in the installation documentation and Starter, Professional and Premium plans on request, and NetBox Enterprise, a self-managed edition with support and extra features. Nothing forces you to subscribe in order to use the software. Because the name NetBox is also used by unrelated products, make sure you are on the netbox-community GitHub organisation or on netboxlabs.com before downloading anything, and be wary of container images published under that name by unknown parties.
Frequently asked questions
Is NetBox free?
Yes for the Community edition, released under the Apache 2.0 licence and installable without restriction on your own server. NetBox Labs separately sells NetBox Cloud, a hosted version, and NetBox Enterprise, a supported version, but the core software is the same.
Does NetBox monitor the network?
No. NetBox documents the intended state of the network and exposes that data through its APIs, but it polls no counters and sends no alerts. For monitoring, pair it with a tool such as LibreNMS, which can in turn draw on the NetBox inventory.
What is the difference between NetBox Community and NetBox Cloud?
The code is identical, but NetBox Cloud is hosted and upgraded by NetBox Labs, with support and options such as single sign-on. NetBox Community is something you install yourself on a Linux server with PostgreSQL and Redis, free of charge.
