The best network emulator was always free and ugly.
Netplex is a one-person mission to fix that — to give network engineers, students and institutes a lab platform that's beautiful, distributed and API-first, without the 2014 Bootstrap UI and the fixpermissions ritual.
Why I built it
I spent years living inside EVE-NG, PNETLAB and GNS3. They got an entire generation of engineers certified — and I'm grateful for them. But every session started the same way: SSH into a server, juggle image files, run fixpermissions, fight a UI that looked like it shipped in 2014, then open yet another external terminal just to type a command.
The emulation underneath was brilliant. The experience around it hadn't moved in a decade. So I started rebuilding the experience — API-first, in the browser, with a canvas you actually want to look at — on top of the same proven open foundations: QEMU/KVM, Open vSwitch, Dynamips.
What makes it different
The headline isn't the pretty UI — it's the distributed fabric. A single topology can span several cheap machines over VXLAN, so you no longer need one big server to run a big lab. Everything the UI does is a documented API call, so labs become code you keep in your own Git. And every error tells you what happened, why, and what to do next — reliability over DRM zeal.
The canvas is the product
Every other surface defers to it. Premium, flat, dark-first — built for engineers reading dense screens at 2am.
Open where it helps
Device kinds, CLI, SDKs, the API schema and docs are open. The moat is the fabric, the cloud and the community — not lock-in.
Never leave you stuck
Self-healing services, a grace window so licensing never kills a running lab, and seamless upgrades. "Just run the updater."
Who it's for
Individuals and enterprises alike — the same product scales from a single-user free tier to a university with SSO, classes, quotas, audit and classroom mode. Students get it free with a school email, because winning the next generation early matters more than squeezing them.
If you've ever tolerated the old tools because there was nothing better — this is for you.