TimeFence: persistent focus timer HUD — buy direct, lifetime license.
Guided workflow variation

A modern alternative to TCPView,built for today’s developer workflow.TCPView alternative Windows

TCPView earned its place in the Sysinternals hall of fame. But it was designed for a different era. Port Detective is a ground-up rewrite of the port monitoring concept—Rust-native, 15 MB of RAM, with live filtering and a background Port Guard daemon.

$4.99 USD — Perpetual License

One-time purchase · Lifetime updates · Delivered via the Microsoft Store

Get PortDetective on Microsoft Store

Purchased and updated securely through the Microsoft Store. No account needed on our site, no subscription, and a Microsoft receipt for easy corporate expensing.

Full PortDetective overview
One-time purchase No telemetry Local-first

windows-only · one-time purchase · no data collection

If this sounds like your week

TCPView is a legend. But legends age.

Sysinternals TCPView has been the go-to Windows port viewer for over two decades. It works. But it shows every TCP and UDP endpoint at once with no filtering, refreshes on a fixed interval instead of streaming live updates, and has no concept of "known" developer ports. When you have hundreds of connections open, finding the one port conflict you care about means scrolling through a wall of system services.

Where tooling usually breaks

Your toolchain evolved. Your port monitor didn’t.

You use VS Code with hot reload, containerized databases, and multiple dev servers across React, Vite, and API backends. TCPView was built when developers had one server process and a handful of connections. It has no search bar, no port tagging, no background monitoring, and no safe process termination. Every time you open it, you spend more time finding the relevant row than fixing the actual problem. A tool from 2006 shouldn’t be the best option in 2026.

Where PortDetective lands

Same mission, modern execution.

Port Detective is built in Rust for minimal resource usage—15 MB of RAM versus TCPView’s 40+ MB. It features instant live search across all listening ports, a Known Ports dictionary that auto-tags processes like Vite, React, Postgres, and MySQL, and a background Port Guard daemon that alerts you to conflicts before they break your build. Process termination uses cryptographic Process Tokens instead of raw PIDs, so you never accidentally kill the wrong application. It’s the TCPView replacement Sysinternals would build today.

$4.99 USD — Perpetual License

One-time purchase · Lifetime updates · Delivered via the Microsoft Store

Get PortDetective on Microsoft Store

Purchased and updated securely through the Microsoft Store. No account needed on our site, no subscription, and a Microsoft receipt for easy corporate expensing.

Learn more about Port Detective

windows-only · one-time purchase · no data collection

What you get

Feature highlights

Quick port visibility for local and staged environments

Quick port visibility for local and staged environments

Clear status output designed for rapid troubleshooting

Clear status output designed for rapid troubleshooting

Privacy-focused workflow with no account requirement

Privacy-focused workflow with no account requirement

Especially when

  • Find what process is using a port on Windows before you kill the wrong service
  • Resolve EADDRINUSE and listening-port conflicts without juggling netstat, tasklist, Task Manager, and Resource Monitor
  • Check local or remote TCP ports quickly during developer and IT troubleshooting

Trusted by pragmatic desktop users

Built for people who prefer tools that stay local.

Real workflows: focus timers that stay visible, batches that never leave the disk, and renames you can rewind.

Customer review 01

PinPoint: Always On Top saves me so much time as I can organize all my report materials without having to flip between windows or tabs. I love the fact that it is straightforward and simple.

Senior Accountant · Manufacturing Company · United States · PinPoint

Learn more
Customer review 02

I used to get so frustrated when my Taskbar would freeze and disappear. Taskbar Sentinel has eliminated that pain without subjecting me to another subscription.

Darren · Calgary, Alberta, Canada · Taskbar Sentinel

Learn more
Customer review 03

OpticBatch and MetaForge are a lifesaver for me as a person with a passion for photography. They give me the ability to stay organized and keep personal information confidential when I post pictures online.

Sherri · United States · OpticBatch & MetaForge

Learn more

Quotes are shown with customer permission; names and locations appear as reviewers provided them.

Publisher Featured & Indexed On

OpenHunts Club Member Featured on IndieHunt

Our Core Moat

Engineered to respect your system boundaries.

System Resource Monitor (Idle State Comparison)
Automata Labs sub-5MB idle memory footprint compared to generic Electron applications

Lightweight Native Stack

Compiled Rust core wrapped inside an optimized Tauri shell. No heavy background node loops or duplicate Chromium engines cooking your memory footprint (<5MB idle RAM).

100% Local-First Privacy

Executes entirely on-device with full offline isolation. Absolute zero background telemetry policies, no metrics aggregation, and zero mandatory cloud-sync accounts.

Perpetual Fallback Licenses

Pay a single, clear one-time purchase price. Own your specific native software utility execution tier permanently without artificial subscription paywalls or ongoing usage tax.

FAQ

Straight answers—no glossary dump

Is Port Detective a fork of TCPView?

No. Port Detective is built from scratch in Rust with its own Windows API integration. It is not based on TCPView or any Sysinternals source code. It was designed specifically for developer and IT admin workflows around port conflict resolution.

How does Port Detective compare to TCPView in resource usage?

Port Detective uses approximately 15 MB of RAM at idle, compared to TCPView which typically uses 40+ MB. Port Detective is compiled as a native Rust binary, which contributes to its lower memory footprint and faster startup time.

Does Port Detective show UDP connections like TCPView?

Port Detective focuses on TCP listening ports, which covers the vast majority of developer port conflict scenarios (EADDRINUSE, blocked dev servers, database connections). This focused scope is what enables instant search and a clutter-free interface.

What is the Port Guard daemon?

Port Guard is a lightweight background service included with Port Detective. It continuously monitors your listening ports and can alert you the moment a new process binds to a port you care about—before you even try to start your dev server and hit an error.

Can I use Port Detective alongside TCPView?

Yes. Both tools read port data from the Windows networking stack without interfering with each other. Many users keep Port Detective running in the background via Port Guard while using TCPView for occasional deep-dive network analysis.

Related pages

Fix EADDRINUSE on Windows—without touching netstat. The GUI that replaces netstat -ano | findstr. Kill the right process. Not the one that recycled its PID. Find what’s using the port. Instantly. No terminal required.

Stop debugging your OS.
Start shipping your code.

PortDetective is a one-time purchase. No subscriptions, no telemetry, no ads. Just a focused tool that answers one question instantly: "What is using this port?"

$4.99 USD — Perpetual License

One-time purchase · Lifetime updates · Delivered via the Microsoft Store

Get PortDetective on Microsoft Store

Purchased and updated securely through the Microsoft Store. No account needed on our site, no subscription, and a Microsoft receipt for easy corporate expensing.

Open full product page

Technical specifications

Technical specifications for procurement

Spec Implementation
Data Sovereignty Port scan results stay on workstation; no cloud dashboard
Telemetry Status None
Core Runtime Native Windows desktop utility
Network Requirements Local scans offline; remote host checks use direct TCP probes (no third-party relay)
Deployment Compatibility Windows 10 and 11; direct purchase
Use case Local and staged-environment port visibility for developers and IT