Chrome DevTools Alternatives for Browser and Network Debugging

Chrome DevTools is the set of debugging panels built into Google Chrome. It still works and still gets new features. Google's docs now list AI assistance powered by Gemini, a Recorder that replays user flows, a Lighthouse panel, and a Chrome DevTools MCP server that lets coding agents such as Claude Code and Copilot read network activity and record traces.

People look past it for three reasons. They need to test a page in an engine Chrome does not use, such as Gecko in Firefox or WebKit in Safari. They need to see traffic from something that is not a Chrome tab, such as an iPhone app, a desktop client or a script. Or they want a tool built for one job, like saving API requests or checking many screen sizes at once. The picks below follow that order: browser inspectors first, then proxies, then an API client and a packet sniffer.

If you arrived searching for game dev tools, this page covers web and network debugging. Browser games built on WebGL get a short answer in the FAQ at the end.

Prices below are as of November 6, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

Firefox Developer Tools

Firefox ships its own devtools on Windows, Mac and Linux, and they run on Gecko, the engine Chrome does not use. A layout bug that appears in Chrome but not in Firefox tells you something before you read a single line of CSS. The panel set will feel familiar: Inspector, Console, Debugger, Network Monitor, Performance and Responsive Design Mode. Its Performance panel is the Firefox Profiler, documented on profiler.firefox.com.

Also in the box: an Accessibility Inspector that exposes the page's accessibility tree, an Application panel for service workers and manifests, and a JavaScript Tracer. The about:debugging page connects to Firefox running on an Android phone. Mozilla also publishes a Firefox DevTools MCP server, so AI assistants can drive Firefox much as Chrome DevTools MCP drives Chrome.

Best for: Front-end developers who want a second engine to check layout and JavaScript bugs against.

Pricing:

• Free, built into Firefox
• Open source, as part of Firefox

Watch out for:

• Firefox's tool index lists no Lighthouse audit panel and no Recorder for user flows. Chrome's panel list has both.
• Mozilla's August 2020 layoffs reached the DevTools team. A Mozilla engineer replied on Mozilla Discourse that the work would focus on maintenance and architecture.

Official site: Firefox Developer Tools. Our listing: Firefox Developer Tools.

Safari Web Inspector

Web Inspector is Apple's debugger for WebKit, and you need it when a bug only shows up in Safari on an iPhone. Turn it on in Safari under Settings, Advanced, Show features for web developers. On the phone, switch on Settings, Safari, Advanced, Web Inspector, then connect it to the Mac by cable or pair it for wireless debugging in Xcode. The device then appears in the Mac's Develop menu.

It reaches more than Safari tabs. On iOS it can inspect home screen web apps and WKWebView or SFSafariViewController content in apps you build and provision yourself. iOS Simulator windows appear in the Develop menu with no setup, because remote inspection is always on there.

Best for: Anyone debugging Safari on iPhone or iPad, or a WebView inside their own iOS app.

Pricing:

• Free, part of Safari on macOS
• No Windows or Linux version

Watch out for:

• Mac only. The WebKit guide requires a Mac running Safari or Safari Technology Preview for every remote session, so a Windows team needs at least one Mac.
• Remote sessions can fail without an error. An Apple Developer Forums thread that ran from 2019 to 2021 reports iPhones that connect but leave the Elements tab empty, and an Apple staff reply could only ask for bug reports.

Official site: Safari Web Inspector.

Polypane

Polypane is a desktop browser for developers that shows one site in many panes at once, each at its own size. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. Under the hood it is Chromium, and the Chromium devtools are there when you need them.

Chrome's device toolbar emulates one viewport at a time. Polypane puts the phone, tablet and desktop layouts next to each other, so a layout that breaks at one width is visible without dragging a window edge. That matters most to people who check responsive layouts many times a day, not once before launch.

Best for: Front-end developers and designers who test responsive layouts at several widths every day.

Pricing:

• 14-day free trial, no credit card
• Individual: $108 a year, as stated in Polypane's own manager letter; one person on up to 3 devices
• Business: priced per seat for 2 to 20 seats, billed yearly
• Enterprise: contact sales, usually 20+ seats
• Free for students through the GitHub Student Developer Pack

Watch out for:

• It is Chromium, with gaps. The known issues page says window.confirm and window.prompt are not implemented and fail silently, and calling the picture-in-picture API crashes the pane.
• There is no free tier once the 14-day trial ends.

Official site: Polypane.

HTTP Toolkit

HTTP Toolkit catches HTTP and HTTPS traffic from clients outside the browser tab too: scripts, desktop apps and phones. Its free Hobbyist tier intercepts every supported client, shows raw HTTP data, and lets you rewrite and resend requests by hand. The code is open source on every tier.

Pro is where it moves past Chrome's Network panel. You get automatic mock responses, injected errors and timeouts, HAR export, validation against more than 2,600 built-in API definitions, TLS passthrough and upstream proxies. Builds exist for Windows, macOS on Apple Silicon or Intel, and Linux as DEB, RPM, Arch package or AppImage on x64 and arm64.

Best for: Developers who want a free, open-source proxy for traffic from apps, scripts and phones.

Pricing:

• Hobbyist: free
• Pro: $15 a month, or $132 a year
• Team: $24 per user per month, or $216 a year; larger teams are sent to sales
• Pro covers one person on any number of devices

Watch out for:

• HAR import and export, mocking and reusable rewrite rules are all Pro features, so the free tier is for viewing traffic and manual edits.
• Team workspaces are still marked coming soon on the pricing page.

Official site: HTTP Toolkit.

Fiddler Everywhere

Fiddler started as a free Windows proxy, and that version, Fiddler Classic, still downloads free for non-commercial use. Telerik says Classic is not in active development and has community-only support. For paid work, Telerik points people to Fiddler Everywhere on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Everywhere decodes HTTP/2, gRPC and Server-Sent Events, which the Classic page says the old app cannot fully inspect. It saves filters and snapshots, shares captured sessions with teammates, and connects to AI coding agents over MCP. Choose it over a browser tool when the traffic comes from a desktop client or a service on another machine.

Best for: Windows-first teams that need a vendor-supported proxy with session sharing and HTTP/2 or gRPC decoding.

Pricing:

• Lite: $7 per user per month billed yearly, $10 monthly, up to 10 licences per purchase
• Pro: $13 per user per month billed yearly, $19 monthly
• Enterprise: $37 per user per month, yearly only, 24-hour support
• Fiddler Classic: free, non-commercial use only, Windows only

Watch out for:

• Everywhere wants an account login. In a Telerik forum thread from 2020 it could not start on an air-gapped server; by September 2023 an offline mode existed, but only on the Enterprise tier.
• No plan is free for commercial use, and Telerik does not publish a trial length.

Official site: Fiddler Everywhere. Our listing: Fiddler Everywhere.

Charles Proxy

Charles is a desktop HTTP proxy that still sells a one-time licence instead of a subscription. Charles 5 came out on March 12, 2025, and the download section lists version 5.2.2 for Windows, macOS and Linux.

One licence costs $50 and covers every 5.x update until the next major version. You point a phone, a simulator or a desktop app at it as an HTTP proxy and read the requests it sends, which Chrome DevTools cannot see at all. The 30-day trial is long enough to test it against your own devices.

Best for: Developers who want a cross-platform proxy paid for once, not every month.

Pricing:

• $50 per user licence for 1 to 4 licences
• $40 each for 5 or more, $30 each for 10 or more
• Site licence $400, multi-site licence $700
• 30-day free trial

Watch out for:

• A licence covers only the major version you bought. Moving to the next one costs 40% of the original price, unless you bought within three months before its release.

Official site: Charles Proxy.

Proxyman

Proxyman sells one licence that runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and its Personal plan adds seats for its iOS and Android apps. Paid plans include one-click capture from iOS Simulator and Android Emulator, which saves setting proxy addresses and certificates by hand.

The paid tiers carry the tools you reach for once Chrome's Network panel runs out: breakpoints, Map Local, Map Remote, scripting, diffing, network conditions and Protobuf decoding. Team plans add shared logs online and team workspaces. Rule sync and SSO were still listed as coming soon.

Best for: iOS and Android developers who want simulator and emulator capture without manual proxy setup.

Pricing:

• Free trial: 1 debugging rule, macOS only, Proxyman Log export only
• Standard: $89 one-time, 1 desktop seat, 1 year of updates
• Personal: $99 one-time, 2 desktop and 2 mobile seats
• Team: $99 per seat, minimum 5 seats, $79 per seat to renew
• Team Subscription: $12 per seat per month, billed yearly, minimum 5 seats

Watch out for:

• The trial is thin. It allows one debugging rule and blocks breakpoints, Map Local, scripting and HAR export, so you cannot judge the full product without paying.
• One-time licences include one year of updates. After that you keep the version you have or pay to renew.

Official site: Proxyman.

Postman

Postman replaces the habit of copying a request from Chrome's Network panel as cURL, editing it and running it again. You keep requests in collections, add tests, and run them with the Collection Runner, which the pricing page lists as unlimited on every plan, Free included.

The free plan changed in March 2026. Postman's plan docs say the Free plan is now limited to one user and cannot create a team, and Free workspaces are public only. A solo developer loses little. A team of three that used to share a free workspace now pays.

Best for: Developers who test and document APIs and want saved, repeatable requests.

Pricing:

• Free: 1 user, public workspaces only, 1,000 monitoring requests a month
• Solo: $9 a month, billed yearly
• Team: $19 per user per month, billed yearly
• Enterprise: contact sales

Watch out for:

• It does not watch live traffic from a browser or app the way a proxy does. Pair it with one of the proxies above if you need both.
• The pricing page contradicts itself on Free AI credits, with 100 on the plan card and 50 a month in the comparison table.

Official site: Postman. Our listing: Postman.

Wireshark

Wireshark sits one layer below every other pick. It captures packets on a network interface, so it sees DNS lookups, TCP retransmits and TLS handshakes that no browser panel shows. Version 4.6.9 is the current stable release, with installers for Windows x64 and Arm64, a Universal macOS image and an Ubuntu PPA.

Open it when Chrome reports a failed request and you need to know if the packets ever left the machine. Each Windows package bundles Npcap, which live capture requires. The project is free, open source and maintained by volunteers.

Best for: Diagnosing connection, DNS and TLS problems below the HTTP layer.

Pricing:

• Free and open source

Watch out for:

• HTTPS stays unreadable by default. You need a key log file written by the browser through SSLKEYLOGFILE, because a server's RSA key does not work with TLS 1.3 or with (EC)DHE cipher suites.

Official site: Wireshark. Our listing: Wireshark.

How to choose

When to stay with Chrome DevTools

Keep Chrome DevTools if most of your users are on Chrome and the bug lives inside one tab. It costs nothing, its Recorder and Lighthouse panels have no direct match in Firefox, and the DevTools MCP server lets a coding agent read the same network and performance data you see. Most tools above work best next to it, not instead of it.

Frequently asked questions