What is Little Snitch?

Little Snitch is a firewall

Little Snitch runs locally on your computer and supervises network connections made to remote computers. It can deny particular connections based on rules. You create rules to enhance security and privacy. By allowing only connections needed by your current software, new (potential malware) programs cannot communicate without your explicit consent. By denying connections to servers known to collect analytics data, you prevent tracking of your behavior.

Little Snitch is application based

Little Snitch is an application firewall. This means that rules can distinguish between apps and allow one app a connection while they deny it for others.

Little Snitch is interactive

If a network connection is not yet covered by a firewall rule, Little Snitch can put it on hold and ask the user how to proceed. The user can then interactively create a rule to allow or deny the connection.

Little Snitch builds on proven expertise

When setting up rules for security and privacy, you can benefit from the findings of others. Little Snitch can synchronize from blocklists, which are like ready-made sets of rules. These lists cover different topics like stopping malware, ads, or tracking. They help keep our networks safe by adding extra protection against bad stuff trying to get in.

Data analysis

Little Snitch can do more than just a firewall: It is also a powerful tool for analysis of past and current connection statistics. You can see which apps connect to which servers in real-time and retrospectively over a period of up to a year. Statistics information includes all relevant connection data (connecting app, remote computer name and Internet address, ports and protocols) as well as whether the connection was allowed, how much data was transferred and coverage by the current rule set. Remote computers can be visualized on a map based on an IP address to location database.

Little Snitch also provides insight into usage of current rules. It reports how often each rule or blocklist entry was used and when it was used for the last time.

Configuration Profiles

Little Snitch is adaptive. Rules and parts of the configuration can be toggled between preconfigured setups known as Profiles, either manually on the user’s request or automatically based on the network joined.

Demo mode

Although Little Snitch is proprietary software, we at Objective Development think (a) that you should be able to test all features of the software before you buy and (b) that a certain level of protection should be available free of charge for everyone. Little Snitch therefore has a built-in demo mode which is active until you entered a license key. It has the following limitations:

The firewall deactivates itself every three hours of use, but you can re-activate it manually as often as you like.
Data analysis via Network Monitor is available for a trial period of 30 days after the first installation.