Methodology

Which tools are in

The starting point is GitHub's reconnaissancetopic. From it, Recon Atlas keeps open-source tools that map an organisation's infrastructure: domains, subdomains, DNS, services, web endpoints, technology and leaked secrets. Some essential tools are not tagged with the topic, so they are added and each page says whether the topic lists it. The library has 33 tools today.

Person-tracking, device location, social engineering capture, exploitation, access-control bypass and credential attack tools are out by rule, whatever their star count. See acceptable use.

Where the facts come from

Every description, install command and example is read from the project's own README or its own documentation site, and each command links to the page it came from. Commands are copied, not rewritten, except that real target names are swapped for reserved documentation hosts (example.com and the 192.0.2.0/24 range) or for scanme.nmap.org, which the Nmap project provides for testing.

Passive, active, or both

A tool is passive when it only reads third-party sources and never sends traffic to the target. It is active when it sends packets, DNS queries or HTTP requests to the target. It has passive and active modeswhen a flag or preset switches between the two. The label comes from the project's documentation, quoted on each page.

Maintenance status

Stars, last push, latest release, licence and archive status come from the GitHub API snapshot taken on November 11, 2026, not from the day the site was built. A repository with no push in 365 days is marked Low activity. An archived repository is marked Archived and points to a maintained alternative where one exists.

The take

Each tool has a short take from Deepak Gupta: when to use it, when to pick something else, and what it will miss. It is labelled as analysis and kept apart from the documented facts. Pages stay out of search indexes until that take has been reviewed.

No rankings

Lists are alphabetical or in the order you would run them for a job. Recon Atlas does not rank tools against each other; ranked comparisons live in Tools.

Corrections

If a command changed, a project moved, or a label is wrong, use the contact page. Project maintainers' corrections are applied first.