NetworkManager Alternatives
NetworkManager is described as 'Set of co-operative tools that make networking simple and straightforward. Whether WiFi, wired, 3G, or Bluetooth, NetworkManager allows you to quickly move from one network to another: once a network has been configured and joined once, it can be detected and' and is an app in the network & admin category. There are nine alternatives to NetworkManager for Linux, Xfce and Mac. The best NetworkManager alternative is wicd, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like NetworkManager are iwmenu, iw, ceni and Ethtool.
Alternatives list
iw is a new nl80211 based CLI configuration utility for wireless devices. It supports almost all new drivers that have been added to the kernel recently. It allows you to configure and show information about wireless networking.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Platforms
- Linux
Network manager used by Linux distributions Sidux and Aptosid, but can be installed on debian based distributions, and compiled from source on just about any.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Platforms
- Linux
- Xfce



Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Platforms
- Linux

wpa_supplicant is designed to be a "daemon" program that runs in the background and acts as the backend component controlling the wireless connection. wpa_supplicant supports separate frontend programs and a text-based frontend (wpa_cli) and a GUI (wpa_gui) are...
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source (BSD-2-Clause)
Platforms
- Mac
- Linux
- Xfce

WvDial (pronounced "Weave Dial") is an easier way to connect to the internet. It completely avoids the need for chat scripts, edits pap-secrets and chap-secrets for you, detects your modem automatically, and chooses a valid init string.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Platforms
- Linux
























Wicd is great for those who change networks often (tablets laptops etc.) It's an excellent interface to "lower level" tools doing the authentication etc. ... command line and GUI interfaces and from my memory allows hotspots / hostapd setup ...