How to see who is on your Wi-Fi from a Mac

Updated September 2026 · by the developer of Census

You want a list of everything connected to your network, and you want to know whether the thing called “unknown” is your neighbour or your own TV. Here are the three ways to get the list, from slowest to fastest, and then the part most guides skip: what “unknown” actually means.

Option 1: your router's admin page

Open Safari and go to your router's address, usually 192.168.1.1, 192.168.0.1 or 10.0.0.1 (System Settings → Wi-Fi → Details shows it as “Router”). Log in and look for “Connected devices”, “Client list” or “DHCP clients”. This is authoritative, since the router hands out every address, but the names are often blank or just a hardware address, and many routers only show devices that asked for an address recently.

Option 2: Terminal

Open Terminal and run:

arp -a

You get every device this Mac has talked to recently, as IP and hardware address pairs. Two catches: it only lists devices your Mac has already exchanged packets with, and the hardware address tells you the maker only if the device is not using a private (randomized) address. To wake the neighbourhood first, ping the broadcast address once:

ping -c 2 192.168.1.255

(replace with your subnet's broadcast address), then run arp -a again.

Option 3: an app that does the walking for you

Census runs the same discovery a network engineer would do by hand, all inside the Mac's sandbox: it reads the neighbour table, pings the subnet, asks Bonjour and mDNS for names, and looks up hardware makers in a table that ships inside the app. You get every device with its name, model, maker, IP and when it first showed up, as a map with the router in the middle or a list grouped by kind. New devices get a badge and a notification. Nothing is uploaded and it never asks for your location.

Why a device shows as “unknown”, and how to tell if it's an intruder

Every scanner prints “unknown” for some devices. There is almost always a mundane reason:

• Private Wi-Fi address. iPhones, iPads, Android phones and recent Windows laptops make up a random hardware address for each network they join. The maker lookup fails by design. This is a privacy feature working, not a stranger. Your own phone is the most common “unknown” on any home network.
• The device doesn't advertise a name. Smart plugs, cheap cameras and some TVs answer pings but never say who they are. Their maker is usually visible from the hardware address.
• It's asleep. A laptop with the lid closed or a phone in a drawer shows as “seen before, quiet now”. It will answer again when it wakes.
• Client isolation. Guest networks and hotel Wi-Fi keep devices from seeing each other. No app can look past that, and a good one says so instead of showing you a short list.

To check a specific device: turn it off or switch its Wi-Fi off, run the scan again, and see which entry goes quiet. If everything you own is accounted for and one entry remains that answers pings at odd hours, change the Wi-Fi password and reconnect your own devices. That is the whole intruder playbook; there is no software shortcut around changing the password.

What none of these methods can do

• They cannot find a device that is powered off or asleep with Wi-Fi off.
• On a Mac they cannot see devices on the other side of a client-isolation wall.
• They cannot tell you what a device is doing, only that it is there. Traffic inspection is a different (and much more invasive) tool.