What is Little Snitch?

Little Snitch is a firewall

Little Snitch runs on your Mac and watches over the network connections between your Mac and the servers it talks to. Based on your rules, it allows some connections and denies others. Good rules improve both your security and your privacy. If you allow only the connections that your software actually needs, a new process, such as malware, can’t communicate without your consent. And if you deny connections to servers that collect analytics data, you stop them from tracking what you do.

Little Snitch is application based

Little Snitch is an application firewall, which means that its rules can tell apps apart. A rule can allow a connection for one app and deny the same connection for all others.

Little Snitch is interactive

When no rule covers a connection yet, Little Snitch can hold the connection and ask you what to do. Your answer becomes a rule, so you decide each case only once.

Little Snitch builds on proven expertise

You don’t have to make all your rules yourself. Blocklists let you use the work of experts: each one is like a ready-made set of deny-rules for a topic, such as malware, ads, or tracking. Little Snitch keeps them up to date from their sources.

Data analysis

Little Snitch is more than a firewall. It also shows you what goes on in your network, right now and for up to a year in the past: which apps connect to which servers, with the hostname and IP address of each server, ports, and protocols. You see whether Little Snitch allowed each connection, how much data it transferred, and whether your rules cover it. A map shows where the servers are located, based on a database that maps IP addresses to locations.

Little Snitch also shows how your rules are used: how often each rule or blocklist entry matched, and when it last matched.

Profiles

Your Mac doesn’t always need the same rules. With profiles, you prepare different sets of rules and settings, for example for the office and for public Wi-Fi networks. You switch profiles yourself, or Little Snitch switches them automatically when your Mac joins a network.

Demo mode

Little Snitch isn’t free software. But we at Objective Development believe that you should be able to try all of its features before you buy a license, and that everybody deserves a basic level of protection free of charge. That’s why Little Snitch runs in demo mode, with a few limits, until you enter a license key.