License & Deployment Mix: 24 tools – 18 OSS, 0 SaaS. (These are local desktop / CLI tools; a vendor-hosted SaaS offering does not apply.)

What Is Serial Port & Telemetry Tooling?

Tools that talk to a device over a serial port (RS-232 / USB serial), and often Bluetooth, TCP, or UDP as well, to monitor, debug, and plot the data coming from embedded boards, microcontrollers, and sensors. They span a spectrum:

• Serial terminals / consoles – open a port, set baud/parity, send and receive bytes, log a capture. The classic embedded/console workflow.
• Serial debug / test tools – multi-protocol (serial + BT + TCP/UDP) send/receive with hex/ASCII views, scripting, and often simple plotting.
• Telemetry plotters / dashboards – parse a live data stream and draw real-time charts, gauges, and dashboards; the “see your sensor data” use case.

Boundaries (what this is not)

• Not general terminal emulators (term-emu/) – those are SSH/telnet/local shells (Alacritty, iTerm, …); here the focus is the serial device link and its telemetry, not a shell.
• Not SCADA / soft-PLC (scada/, soft-plc/) – those run industrial processes; these just read and visualise a serial/telemetry stream.
• Not infrastructure monitoring (monitoring/) – that watches servers, not a microcontroller on a USB cable.

The information on these pages was researched by a combination of human review and large language models. To suggest an addition or correction, please contact us. Prepared by Rhodium Systems Inc., author of the ResorsIT platform — a unified IT operations management platform for IT teams and MSPs that integrates a curated suite of open-source, commercial, and SaaS applications into a single system with shared identity, single sign-on, access control, and a common audit trail. Use this catalogue only as a starting point for your own research, and review any tool carefully against your own requirements before relying on it. Catalogue data version 2026.197.

Comparison

At a glance

How to choose

• Just a serial console (log in to a device, watch a boot log) – tio (modern), minicom / picocom (classic), or a GUI: CuteCom, GTKTerm, moserial.
• Plot live sensor / telemetry data – Serial Studio or PlotJuggler (richest), SerialPlot / Better Serial Plotter / Teleplot (simple), seriot / Tauno on Linux.
• Debug a mixed serial + TCP/UDP protocol – SerialTest, COMTool, SerialTool, or Realterm (Windows, binary capture).
• Windows shop that wants a polished free GUI – CoolTerm, Termite, or Hercules; Docklight / Serial Port Monitor if a paid analyzer / sniffer is justified.

Boundaries

• SSH / telnet / local-shell terminals live in term-emu/; industrial process control in scada/ and soft-plc/; infrastructure monitoring in monitoring/.

Tools

24 tools.

Better Serial Plotter

A cross-platform desktop drop-in replacement for the Arduino IDE Serial Plotter with multi-plot, dual y-axes, and CSV export.

License: MIT (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

COMTool

Cross-platform Python/Qt serial, TCP/UDP and SSH debug assistant with plugins, plotting and scheduled auto-send.

License: LGPL-3.0-only (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

CoolTerm

CoolTerm is a freeware serial-port terminal for exchanging data with microcontrollers, GPS receivers, and other hardware, with hex display and data logging on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

License: Proprietary (proprietary) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website

CuteCom

CuteCom is a Qt graphical serial terminal for connecting to serial devices with configurable line settings, hex/ASCII views, logging, and file send.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

Docklight

Docklight is a commercial Windows serial-protocol testing, analysis, and simulation tool that monitors, logs, detects, and responds to RS232/RS485/TCP/UDP/USB-HID/Bluetooth communications, with a scripting edition and a DLL automation API.

License: Proprietary (proprietary) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website

GTKTerm

GTKTerm is a GTK graphical serial terminal for Linux/POSIX systems, used to talk to embedded devices, microcontrollers, modems, GPS, and CNC machines.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

Hercules SETUP utility

Hercules SETUP utility is a freeware Windows terminal from HW-group that combines RS-232/RS-485 serial, TCP/IP client and server, and UDP terminals in one portable executable for testing and configuring network and serial devices.

License: Proprietary (proprietary) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website

minicom

minicom is the classic text-mode serial communication program for connecting to serial consoles, modems, and embedded devices from a terminal.

License: GPL-2.0-or-later (OSS) · Kind: cli · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

moserial

moserial is a GNOME graphical serial terminal for interacting with serial devices, with ASCII/hex views and session recording.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

picocom

picocom is a minimal dumb-terminal serial program for talking to serial consoles and modems from a shell, with a tiny footprint.

License: GPL-2.0-or-later (OSS) · Kind: cli · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

PlotJuggler

PlotJuggler is a fast desktop time-series plotting and analysis tool, widely used in robotics and ROS, that visualizes streamed or logged data with transforms and plugins.

License: MPL-2.0 (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

QSerial

Cross-platform Qt serial-port utility for sending text/hex/base64 and viewing received bytes in multiple encodings.

License: MIT (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

Realterm

A Windows serial and TCP terminal for engineering, reverse engineering, debugging, and datalogging, with hex/binary display modes and file capture.

License: BSD-3-Clause (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

Serial Port Monitor

Serial Port Monitor is commercial Windows software from Electronic Team (Eltima) that sniffs, monitors, logs, and analyzes COM-port traffic in real time, including ports already in use, with table, dump, terminal, and Modbus views.

License: Proprietary (proprietary) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website

Serial Studio

Serial Studio is a real-time telemetry dashboard and data-visualization tool for serial, Bluetooth LE, TCP/UDP, and MQTT streams from embedded devices and sensors.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

SerialPlot

SerialPlot is an open-source Qt desktop application that reads and plots numeric data from a serial port in real time, supporting ASCII and binary frame formats.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

SerialTest

Cross-platform serial, Bluetooth, TCP and UDP data transceiver with a realtime plotter, hex/ASCII views and file transfer.

License: GPL-3.0-only (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

SerialTool

Cross-platform C++/Qt Serial-Port/TCP/UDP debugging tool with terminal, multi-channel waveform display and XModem file transfer.

License: GPL-3.0-only (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

Seriot

Seriot is a GNOME/GTK4 desktop serial monitor and serial plotter for Linux that displays and graphs live data from a serial port.

License: GPL-3.0-only (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

Tauno Serial Plotter

Tauno Serial Plotter is a lightweight Python/PyQt6 desktop plotter that graphs live numeric data from a serial port for Arduino and other embedded devices.

License: GPL-3.0-only (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

Telemetry Viewer

Telemetry Viewer is a Java desktop tool that reads telemetry over UART/serial, TCP, or UDP and renders it into a tiled dashboard of line charts, FFTs, histograms, and dials.

License: Proprietary (proprietary) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

Teleplot

A ridiculously simple telemetry plotter that visualizes data from print-style statements sent over Serial or UDP, with a VS Code extension and standalone web app.

License: MIT (OSS) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source

Termite

Termite is a free Windows RS232 serial terminal from CompuPhase with a chat-style interface, command history, and an extensible plug-in filter architecture for hex view, logging, timestamps, and auto-replies.

License: Proprietary (proprietary) · Kind: desktop · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website

tio

tio is a modern, simple serial device tool for connecting to serial consoles with auto-reconnect, logging, hex mode, and Lua scripting.

License: GPL-2.0-or-later (OSS) · Kind: cli · Deploy: native · SSO: none

Website · Source