NetMute
NetMute
Two ways to control what your Mac sends
LuLu, from Patrick Wardle's nonprofit Objective-See, is a free, open-source (GPLv3) outbound firewall. When an app opens a connection LuLu has no rule for, it shows an alert, and your answer becomes a rule. The current version is 4.5.1, released on 5 August 2026.
NetMute starts from a different question: not "allow this connection?" but "which of these connections are tracking me?". It is a per-app firewall for macOS, run from the menu bar and a main window, with a Tracker Shield that blocks known tracking domains without a prompt and a privacy grade for every app, based on what it actually contacts.
A real example from the developer's own Mac (7 to 22 September 2026): GeForce NOW contacted 59 domains. Two of them were tracking endpoints, feedbacks.telemetry.data.nvidia.com and events.telemetry.data.nvidia.com, and NetMute blocked both without asking a single question.
What LuLu does well, and where NetMute goes further
Where LuLu is the better pick. It is free with no paid tier, and its source code is public, so you can audit exactly what it does. If you want to decide every connection yourself and open source matters most to you, in our view LuLu is the strongest free choice on the Mac.
What LuLu gives you:
- Alerts for unknown outbound connections, saved as rules for a whole app or a single destination (optionally with a port), permanent or expiring
- Block and allow lists loaded from a local file or a remote URL (you choose and maintain the list)
- Passive mode, which applies your existing rules without alerts
- Profiles, switched by hand
- A Network Monitor menu item that opens Objective-See's Netiquette, a live connection viewer
Where NetMute goes further:
- Trackers handled for you. NetMute ships its own curated list of 300+ tracker domains and blocks them without a prompt per connection. With LuLu, recognising a tracker is your job, or the job of a list you found.
- A privacy grade per app. App X-Ray grades each app on what it actually contacts, so you see at a glance which apps deserve a closer look.
- History, not just the moment. NetMute keeps traffic history per app: the current week in the free version, months with CSV export in Pro. Over 30 days on the developer's Mac it stopped 2,701 tracker requests from 64 companies across 33 apps. LuLu keeps no historical charts.
- Automation. Custom profiles, schedules, per-app data limits and On the go, which applies itself when you join a hotspot and puts everything back when you leave. LuLu's profiles switch only by hand, and it has no data limits.
- Fewer pop-ups. With Quiet Mode, new connections are recorded instead of popped up, and you decide the backlog in one pass.
Free and open source vs. free to start
LuLu costs nothing and has no paid tier; donations are welcome.
NetMute is free to download, with no time limit. The free version already includes the per-app firewall (block an app or single destinations), live traffic per app, Tracker Shield for the 50 most active tracker domains, 5 custom domain blocks and the current week of history.
Pro is a single one-time purchase: no subscription, no account, and all updates within the major version. It adds the full Tracker Shield (300+ domains), App X-Ray, the Privacy Dashboard, reports over months with CSV export, per-app data limits, custom profiles, schedules, On the go and unlimited domain blocks. Get it on the Mac App Store (Pro as an in-app purchase) or as a direct download with a licence key, which also offers team licences for 5 or 10 Macs and an invoice with your VAT ID.
The honest trade: NetMute is closed source, Mac only and newer than LuLu, and in browsers that resolve names on their own (such as Brave) name-based blocking needs one extra setting. NetMute's "Where NetMute protects" check shows you where blocking works. What you get in return is the tracker research done for you.
