ShellYard combines diagnostics with connections, docs, IPAM, credentials, APIs, databases, and Magellan AI — on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Honest comparison; ETS is good at what it does.
Respect
ETS is a mature collection of focused network utilities. The DNS analyzer, response-time monitor, Subnet Calculator, IP Address Tracker, Wake-on-LAN, and the SNMP tools have been a network engineer's standby for two decades. If your day is bulk SNMP polling, low-level packet analysis, or scripted IP management, ETS does that well — and it's reasonable to keep using it.
The difference
ETS is a collection of standalone Windows utilities. ShellYard combines diagnostics with the connection you ran them through, the credentials they used, the documentation that describes the network, the API client that hit the management endpoint, and the AI assistant that helps you make sense of the output — all in one workspace.
DNS (forward, reverse, MX, TXT), MTR with latency, Nmap port scan, TLS certificate inspection, WHOIS / RDAP, NTP probe, SNMP browser with standard MIBs bundled, syslog viewer, packet capture, AP scanner, file transfer (TFTP / FTP / SFTP), bulk command runner, batch SSH. Not every ETS utility has a one-to-one equivalent, but the common 80% is in one window.
SSH, RDP, VNC, serial console, AWS SSM, in-app browser session, local terminal — saved per Space, tabbed, with vault-resolved credentials. ETS leaves the connection to PuTTY / SecureCRT / Royal TS / etc. ShellYard keeps the connection and the diagnostic in one workspace.
Notes, runbooks, network overviews, host inventories, and IPAM (subnets + hosts) inside the Space. ETS has IP Address Tracker for IP management, but the documentation around it lives somewhere else. ShellYard keeps the IPAM record, the SSH session, the SNMP walk, and the runbook entry in one place.
ETS doesn't ship one. ShellYard's HTTP client supports REST, GraphQL, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events, with Postman v2.1 / OpenAPI / cURL / HAR imports, and the ability to route requests through an active SSH session for internal-only APIs.
Postgres, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server (T-SQL), SQLite, Redis, MongoDB. Health dashboards, schema browser, query editor, key inspector, document viewer. ETS doesn't cover this — DBAs typically open DBeaver / DataGrip alongside ETS. ShellYard collapses that into one workspace.
Attach a packet capture, an SNMP walk, an MTR trace, a switch config diff, a syslog stream — Magellan explains, recommends, and drafts documentation. BYO Anthropic / OpenAI / Gemini / Ollama key. ETS has nothing like this; it predates the model.
ETS is licensed per technician and lives on their Windows machine. ShellYard Team uses Shared Spaces with members, groups, ACLs, and audit logs — the workspace itself becomes a team artifact, not a per-tech tool. Cross-platform: macOS, Windows, Linux.
Honest verdict
You want a single workspace across diagnostics, connections, docs, API, databases, and AI. You're cross-platform (or want to be). Your team needs shared workspaces and audit trails. You hate maintaining 6 separate Windows installs per engineer. Network documentation in a separate portal is a chronic pain point.
Honest verdict
You depend on specific ETS utilities — bulk SNMP polling at the scale ETS does it, a very specific WAN Killer / TraceRoute behavior, deep integration with other SolarWinds Orion products, or a workflow your team has built around the existing tool. Both can coexist; ShellYard's strength is the workspace around the work, not displacing every standalone utility.
They can coexist on the same engineer's machine. Free is enough to evaluate every diagnostic, connection, and tool. Decide on your own timeline.