Who Is on My WiFi? How to Find Every Device on Your Network

Who is actually on your Wi-Fi? Most homes have far more devices than anyone remembers: phones, TVs, speakers, cameras, and a few things nobody can name. In this video we'll find all of them, and then work out what an unknown device really is.

Everything you see here is DeviceShelf's demo network. It's a made-up home with forty-four devices, so none of these addresses belong to a real person. Your own network looks the same, just with your devices in it.

It all starts with a scan. Click Scan in the top right. DeviceShelf asks every address in your network who is there, listens for the names devices announce about themselves, and checks which services they offer. Watch the list fill up as devices answer.

The four boxes at the top sum it up: how many devices are online, how many kinds of devices there are, how many open ports the scan found, and the average response time.

Each row is one device. You get its name and hardware address, its IP address, the vendor, a device type, the open ports and the response time. The vendor comes from the first half of the hardware address, which every manufacturer registers. That alone often tells you what you're looking at.

Click a column header to sort by it. Sorting by vendor groups all the Apple devices, all the Ubiquiti gear and so on. Click IP address to get back to the usual order.

To find something quickly, type into the filter. The filter looks at names, addresses, vendors and types at the same time. Here are all the Apple devices.

Next to it you can switch between all devices, only the ones online right now, and the ones that have gone offline.

Under Columns you choose what the list shows. You can add the hostname, the model, the operating system or when a device was first seen, and hide what you don't need.

See the button with the sparkle and the number two? DeviceShelf keeps track of every device it has ever seen. When something joins that wasn't there before, it's marked as new and waits for your answer.

Click it, and the list shows only those devices. Here we have two: a Pixel 8 phone and a PlayStation 5.

Click a device to open its details. The top part shows what the scan knows: the IP address, the hardware address, the vendor, which is Google here, the hostname, the model and the moment it was first seen.

Right at the top, DeviceShelf asks the question that matters: new device, is this yours? Nobody has answered it yet.

If you don't recognize it, click Ignore to keep it out of your way. DeviceShelf doesn't block devices itself. That's your router's job, and the router's own settings are where you lock a stranger out.

This one is a new phone in the family, so: Yes, it's mine. The device stays in the list, but it no longer counts as new, and it drops out of this filter.

Same for the PlayStation. Once everything has an answer, the New button disappears. So from then on, a number on that button means exactly one thing: something joined your network that you haven't seen yet.

Two devices from a vendor called Espressif. Most people have never heard the name, yet it turns up in almost every home network.

Espressif makes the small Wi-Fi chips inside smart plugs, light bulbs, sensors and a lot of do-it-yourself electronics. So the vendor tells you what's inside, not whose product it is. To narrow it down, DeviceShelf has an AI identification.

In the Tools section, click AI identification. DeviceShelf sends what it found about this one device, the vendor, the hostname and the open ports, to the AI provider you picked in the settings, and asks it what the device most likely is.

The answer comes with its reasoning, so you can judge it yourself. Here: an Espressif-based smart-home device with a small web page, typical for firmware like ESPHome or Tasmota.

The AI is optional and off until you set it up. Under Settings, AI assistant, you pick a provider: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and several others, or Ollama, which runs on your own computer. With a local model, nothing about your network leaves the house.

Below that, What the AI gets shows the exact instruction and the device data for every AI feature. You can rewrite the instruction, and decide what may be sent at all.

Now that we know what it is, give it a proper name. Under Your details, type a name you'll recognize in a year. Garage temperature sensor.

Set the device type, so it gets the right icon, and add tags. Tags work like labels: you can filter by them later, for example to see everything in the garage.

The comment field takes everything else, like who set it up or where the password hint is. Everything here is saved on your computer as you type.

And of course: it's ours, so mark it as Mine.

If you have many devices of the same kind, you don't have to do this one by one. Under Settings, Scanning, there are identification rules. A rule says: when the vendor contains Espressif, file the device as smart home and tag it. Rules only fill in what you left empty, so they never overwrite a name you typed.

One more setting is worth knowing. Some devices don't answer a scan: phones that are asleep, or anything behind a firewall. Your router knows them anyway. Connect your router here, a FRITZ!Box, UniFi, OPNsense and many others, and those devices appear in the list too, with the names from the router.

So far we've looked once. The real value comes when DeviceShelf keeps watching. Click the Auto button next to the filter: DeviceShelf then scans on its own, every five minutes by default, or at whatever interval you choose.

Under Settings, Alerts, you decide how you hear about changes. There are desktop notifications, e-mail through your own mailbox, and webhooks for tools like Home Assistant or IFTTT. Quiet hours keep it silent at night.

And the timeline keeps a record of everything that happened: which device joined when, which went offline, which opened a new port. If something showed up while you were away, this is where you'll find it.

So: scan once, answer the question for every new device, and when one is a mystery, let the vendor, the details or the AI tell you what it is. Give it a name you'll recognize. Then leave DeviceShelf watching, and the next newcomer arrives as a notification.

In the next video we'll look at the other big question: which device is using up your bandwidth. DeviceShelf runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. You'll find it at deviceshelf dot app.