Netmon vs Paca

Netmon and Paca are both productivity tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

Netmon

netmon runs a speed test every hour, scans active LAN devices via nmap ARP sweep, logs results to a local SQLite database, and every four hours fires a Telegram report with a 24-hour trend graph and an LLM-generated commentary on your network's behavior. The workflow is fixed: timed cycles, no branching, no autonomous decisions. That's intentional — it's a scheduled reporter, not an agent. It fits a Raspberry Pi tucked in a closet without complaint. The ceiling appears when you want anything beyond Telegram delivery, custom alert thresholds, or multi-site aggregation — none of those are in the codebase, so you extend it yourself or accept the defaults.

Paca

Paca is a self-hosted, open-source Scrumban board where AI agents participate in the full sprint cycle alongside humans: planning BDD specs, picking up tasks, running QA verification, and feeding retrospective data into the next sprint. The P·A·C·A loop — Plan, Act, Check, Adapt — mirrors Scrum phases and gives agents structured context through living BDD scenarios and System Design Documents, so they aren't operating blind. An in-app chat converts plain-English instructions into real backlog items without tab-switching. Every change — from agents and humans alike — lands in a diff-based activity feed with one-click revert. The ceiling appears when your workflow departs from Scrum or Scrumban structure; teams running Kanban-only or highly custom processes will find the framework opinionated.

Attribute	Netmon	Paca
Pricing	Free	Free
Free trial	No	No
Open source	Yes	Yes
Has API	No	Yes
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	macOS, Linux	Linux (Docker), browser-based UI
Pros	All data stays on-device in a local SQLite database, so no third-party service ever sees your network performance history — which means GDPR concerns, data broker exposure, and cloud outage dependencies simply don't apply. Hourly speed tests with a 24-hour trend graph generated locally, so you get a timestamped record of ISP degradation without paying for a SaaS monitoring seat. LAN device counts via nmap ARP scan on each cycle, so you catch unexpected devices joining your network without running a separate discovery tool. MIT-licensed with a minimal file structure (under 15 source files per the repository), so forking and adding a custom alert condition or output channel is scoped work, not an archaeology project. Designed explicitly for Raspberry Pi deployment, so the hardware cost to run it continuously is negligible and the setup assumes constrained resources from the start.	Agents appear as assigned teammates on the live Scrumban board and post real-time task updates, which means sprint visibility stays in one place instead of split between your board and a separate AI dashboard you have to manually reconcile. BDD scenarios and living System Design Documents anchor every agent's context to how the product actually works, so agents don't generate output that contradicts your existing architecture or acceptance criteria. One-click diff revert on every change — agent or human — means teams can let agents move at full speed without a separate approval bottleneck on every action, and roll back anything that lands wrong without hunting through logs. Self-hosted under Apache 2.0 with no per-seat cost, so data stays on your infrastructure and the tool stays off your SaaS budget regardless of team size. In-app project-level chat converts plain-English instructions directly into backlog items and docs without leaving the board, which means product managers without technical fluency can drive sprint planning alongside agents without a separate tool in the chain.
Cons	There is no threshold-based alerting: if your download speed drops to 2 Mbps at 3 a.m., netmon logs it and includes it in the next four-hour report — it does not wake you up. Teams that need immediate breach-of-SLA notification have to add their own alerting layer or switch to a tool like Uptime Kuma or Healthchecks.io that has this built in. Telegram is the only delivery channel. There is no webhook, no email output, no HTTP endpoint, and no local web dashboard. If your organization blocks Telegram or you want alerts in Slack or PagerDuty, you are rewriting tg.py yourself before this tool is usable. The fixed four-hour report cadence and one-hour test interval are not configurable through the .env file alone — adjusting the schedule means modifying runner.py directly. Teams with non-standard monitoring windows discover this after setup, not before. There is no multi-site or multi-network support. A single netmon instance monitors one LAN. Anyone managing more than one location — a home office and a remote cabin, a small business with two subnets — runs separate instances with no aggregation layer, which defeats the purpose of a unified view.	The P·A·C·A cycle is the structural backbone of the product, not an optional configuration — teams running Kanban-only flows, shape-up cycles, or heavily customized processes will find the sprint-phase assumptions surfacing constantly, and adapting the tool to a non-Scrum workflow means working against the grain of how agents are wired into the board. At v0.4.0, the plugin ecosystem and community extension library are early-stage; teams that need a mature integration surface — existing webhooks, third-party CI/CD hooks, or established plugin catalog — will hit gaps that require them to build rather than install, adding engineering overhead before they get to the actual agent work. Any team that needs auditable, manager-approved gates before agent changes affect the board — regulated industries, client-facing projects with contractual deliverable sign-off — will find the current revert-after-the-fact model insufficient; when the compliance requirement is approval before the change lands, not rollback after, teams in that situation will move to a tool with explicit pre-ship review steps built into the workflow.

Bottom line

Only Paca exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Netmon and Paca?

Netmon is Free and open source, while Paca is Free and open source. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is Netmon better than Paca?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.

Netmon vs Paca: which should I pick?

Pick Netmon if its pricing model, openness, or platform fit matches your constraints; pick Paca otherwise. Check free-trial availability on each listing if you want to test before committing.

Comparison data is sourced and verified by the AIDiveForge data pipeline. AIDiveForge is editorially independent.