hakrawler vs massdns: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
hakrawler is a free penetration testing tool. massdns is a free penetration testing tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best penetration testing fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of available product data, here is our conclusion:
Penetration testers and bug bounty hunters who need fast endpoint discovery during reconnaissance should start with hakrawler; it crawls web applications an order of magnitude quicker than manual mapping, with 4,841 GitHub stars reflecting sustained adoption by practitioners who run it continuously across engagement kickoffs. The tool's speed comes from its parallelized crawling architecture, which surfaces forgotten endpoints and asset exposure before deeper testing begins. Skip this if your mandate is vulnerability scoring or compliance reporting; hakrawler is reconnaissance-only, and you'll need separate tools for exploitation and risk quantification.
Penetration testers and security researchers running subdomain enumeration campaigns will get the most from massdns; its multi-threaded stub resolver processes 350,000+ queries per second, making it the fastest option for bulk DNS reconnaissance at scale. The 3,417 GitHub stars reflect actual adoption in red teams, and the free pricing means zero friction for integration into custom reconnaissance pipelines. Skip this if your team needs a managed, point-and-click subdomain discovery tool; massdns requires command-line comfort and assumes you're building automation around raw DNS data.
