Wireshark Alternatives for Packet Capture and Network Analysis

Wireshark still works and is still free and open source. The download page lists 4.6.9 as the stable release, 4.4.19 as old stable and 5.0.0rc1 as the next version in testing, with installers for Windows x64 and Arm64, a Universal macOS image and an Ubuntu PPA. Every Windows package bundles Npcap, which live capture needs.

So people who search for an alternative usually want a different shape of tool, not a replacement for a dead one. A sysadmin needs a capture that runs on a server with no screen. A Windows admin wants what replaced Microsoft Network Monitor. An incident responder wants the files and passwords inside a pcap, not a packet list. A security team wants weeks of traffic indexed and searchable. The picks below cover those jobs, free tools first and paid analyzers after.

TShark is left out because it is Wireshark's own command-line version and installs with it. If you only need to read HTTP requests from a browser or an app, a debugging proxy such as Fiddler or Charles is a better fit than any packet tool. Those proxies get their own write-up in our Chrome DevTools alternatives guide.

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

Quick comparison

tcpdump

On a server you reach over SSH, tcpdump is the usual first move. It is a command-line sniffer built on libpcap, the same capture library Wireshark uses on Linux and macOS. The tcpdump.org home page lists 4.99.7 as the stable release, dated September 21, 2026, with better decoding for BIG TCP, MPTCP and the new TCP AE flag. A libpcap 1.10.7 security release on September 5, 2026 fixed CVE-2026-0799 and CVE-2026-31912.

The common pattern is to capture on the box and analyze somewhere else. The -w flag writes raw packets to a file instead of printing them, and -r reads files written by any tool that saves pcap or pcapng. Copy that file to your laptop and open it in Wireshark, NetworkMiner or Zeek. Both tcpdump and libpcap are under a 3-clause BSD licence.

Best for: Admins who need a quick capture on a Linux or BSD server with no desktop.

Pricing:

• Free and open source, 3-clause BSD licence

Watch out for:

• Encrypted traffic stays encrypted. The only decryption option in the man page is -E for IPsec ESP, and only when tcpdump was compiled with cryptography enabled. There is no TLS support.
• It prints one line per packet. The man page describes no TCP stream reassembly, so following a whole conversation means moving the file into another tool.

Official site: tcpdump.

NetworkMiner

NetworkMiner, from Netresec, sorts a capture by host, file and session instead of by packet. Load a pcap and it lists the images, documents and certificates that crossed the wire, plus any credentials it can extract. Version 3.2 shipped on October 7, 2026, according to the changelog on the product page.

Netresec calls the free edition open source. It does live sniffing, parses PCAP and Windows ETL files, and handles IPv6. ETL support matters if your captures come from Pktmon on Windows. The paid Professional edition adds PcapNG parsing, a packet carver for damaged files, VoIP audio playback, OSINT lookups, export to CSV, Excel, XML and JSON-LD, and command-line scripting with a Corporate License.

Best for: Incident responders and CTF players who want the files and logins inside a capture, not a packet list.

Pricing:

• Free edition: open source, no charge
• NetworkMiner Professional: $1,300 USD, as listed in the edition table on the product page
• Command-line scripting needs a Corporate License

Watch out for:

• The free edition does not parse PcapNG files, the format Wireshark saves by default. The feature table reserves PcapNG for Professional, so you may need to convert files to pcap first.
• It is a Windows program first. Netresec says it can run on Linux, and its FAQ says Mono support on macOS is very limited.

Official site: NetworkMiner.

Sniffnet

For people who opened Wireshark once and closed it, Sniffnet is the gentler option. It is a desktop app that shows which hosts your computer is talking to, how much traffic each one uses and which programs generate it. Remote hosts come with country, domain name and ASN. The README lists Windows installers for x64, arm64 and x86, macOS images for Intel and Apple silicon, and Linux DEB, RPM and AppImage packages.

You pick an adapter, set filters and watch live charts. Custom notifications and IP blacklists can warn you when something unexpected connects. Reports can be exported as PCAP files and opened in a full analyzer later. Version 1.5.1 is the latest release on GitHub, dated July 22, 2026, and the code is dual-licensed under Apache-2.0 and MIT.

Best for: Home users and developers who want to see what their machine connects to without learning display filters.

Pricing:

• Free and open source, Apache-2.0 or MIT

Watch out for:

• Its feature list is about connections, hosts and bandwidth. It does not list a per-packet protocol view, so it will not show you a malformed header the way Wireshark does.
• Capture libraries are not always bundled. The README tells you to install the required dependencies for your operating system first, and those steps live on a separate wiki at sniffnet.app.

Official site: Sniffnet.

Pktmon

Microsoft Network Monitor is no longer developed, and Microsoft Message Analyzer was retired, and its downloads were removed, on November 25, 2019. The capture tool Microsoft still ships is Packet Monitor, or pktmon.exe. Microsoft's Pktmon docs list it as built into Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows Server 2016 through 2025 and Azure Local 2311.2 and later.

Pktmon does more than capture. It filters and counts packets and reports where in the Windows networking stack a packet was dropped, which helps with container networking and SDN problems that a normal sniffer cannot see. Logs are written in ETL format. One command converts them to pcapng for Wireshark, and another prints a text decode based on TcpDump parsing. Windows Admin Center adds a graphical front end.

Best for: Windows admins who cannot install Npcap on a server, or need to find where Windows itself dropped a packet.

Pricing:

• Free, part of Windows 10, Windows 11 and Windows Server 2016 and later

Watch out for:

• There is no packet viewer of its own on the command line. The docs send you to Wireshark after a pcapng conversion, or to Network Monitor with special parsers for the raw ETL files.
• The supported media types listed are Ethernet, Wi-Fi and mobile broadband only.

Official site: Pktmon.

Zeek

Zeek turns traffic into records instead of showing it packet by packet. Its docs describe it as a passive, open-source network traffic analyzer that logs every connection, plus application data such as all HTTP sessions with their requested URIs. Output lands in tab-separated or JSON files such as conn.log, dns.log, http.log and files.log, which the docs say are built for post-processing in other tools.

The Get Zeek page lists Zeek 9.0.1 as the current LTS release and 8.0.11 as the previous LTS, both dated October 26, 2026. Binary packages exist for Linux through the openSUSE Build Service, for macOS through Homebrew and MacPorts, and for FreeBSD and OpenBSD, plus Docker images. All of Zeek's default analysis runs as scripts in its own language, so you can add detection logic of your own. It is BSD licensed.

Best for: Security and network teams who want months of searchable connection logs from a SPAN port or tap.

Pricing:

• Free and open source, BSD licence

Watch out for:

• It does not replace Wireshark's packet view. The docs say Zeek is not a protocol analyzer in the sense of Wireshark and does not store traffic as PCAP at scale.
• It is not a signature IDS and cannot block, drop or modify traffic. The same page points signature users to Snort or Suricata.

Official site: Zeek.

Colasoft Capsa

Capsa is a commercial Windows network analyzer from Colasoft, and its current tutorials cover Capsa 7. It suits people who want traffic monitoring and alerts on a Windows PC more than a raw packet list. The Capsa page lists two editions: Capsa Enterprise and Capsa Free.

Capsa Free monitors up to 10 IP addresses, ends sessions after 4 hours and has no Wi-Fi monitoring. That is enough to watch a small office link or learn the interface. Enterprise removes those caps and comes with a 30-day trial download. Supported systems are 64-bit Windows 10 and 11, Windows 7 SP1 and 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 through 2019.

Best for: Windows-based IT teams who prefer traffic dashboards and alerts over reading raw packets.

Pricing:

• Capsa Free: no charge, 10 IP addresses, 4-hour session limit, no Wi-Fi monitoring
• Capsa Enterprise: starts at $1,295 on the purchase page
• 30-day Enterprise trial

Watch out for:

• Colasoft publishes only a starting price on its purchase page. It does not say if that buys a perpetual licence or a subscription, or what maintenance costs.
• The supported OS list stops at Windows Server 2019. Server 2022 and 2025 are not named on the Capsa page.

Official site: Colasoft Capsa.

Omnipeek

Omnipeek is the long-running commercial protocol analyzer that LiveAction sold for years. BlueCat agreed to buy LiveAction in October 2024, and the Omnipeek page now carries a banner saying LiveAction's capabilities are part of BlueCat's network observability products. It runs on Windows.

Wireless is its main draw over Wireshark. With the Omnipeek WiFi adapter, a USB WLAN device, it captures on multiple Wi-Fi channels at the same time. It can also connect to LiveWire capture appliances and virtual probes, so an engineer at a desk can troubleshoot a branch office link remotely. A free trial download is linked from the product page.

Best for: Network engineers who troubleshoot Wi-Fi and remote sites and want a supported vendor behind the tool.

Pricing:

• No public price; the page offers Request a Quote
• Free trial download available

Watch out for:

• No price is published anywhere on the product page, so budgeting means a sales call.
• Windows only, and multi-channel Wi-Fi capture depends on the vendor's own USB adapter.

Official site: Omnipeek.

PCAPdroid

Wireshark has no Android app, and PCAPdroid fills that gap. It captures the traffic of other apps on the phone without root by simulating a VPN. You can record to PCAP files with extra app metadata, or stream packets live over PCAP-over-IP into Wireshark on your computer.

It can also decrypt HTTPS and TLS traffic, extract the URLs and save an SSLKEYLOGFILE, which Wireshark then uses to read the same capture in clear text. Connections are tied to the app that opened them, and the app can block them too. It is open source, published on F-Droid and Google Play, and its releases are also on GitHub.

Best for: Mobile developers and privacy researchers who need to see what an Android app sends.

Pricing:

• Free and open source; download from F-Droid or Google Play

Watch out for:

• Without root it takes the phone's VPN slot. The README lists capture while other VPN apps are running as a rooted-only feature.

Official site: PCAPdroid.

Arkime

Arkime, called Moloch until its rename, records full packets around the clock and indexes every session in OpenSearch or Elasticsearch. Analysts search sessions in a web UI and download the pcap for just the flows they need, often weeks after the traffic passed. Version 6.9.1 is the latest release on GitHub, with assets dated October 22, 2026, under the Apache 2.0 licence.

The FAQ lists packages for Amazon Linux 2023, Arch, Debian 12 and 13, EL 9 and 10, Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, and FreeBSD 14 and 15, plus containers. macOS works through Homebrew for development, but the FAQ says that setup has not been vetted in production. EL 8 builds end with Arkime 7.

Best for: Security teams who need to go back in time and pull the exact packets of an incident.

Pricing:

• Free and open source, Apache 2.0 licence
• Hardware and OpenSearch or Elasticsearch storage are the real cost

Watch out for:

• It needs serious hardware. The FAQ suggests 64 to 96 GB of memory and at least 2 x 6 cores per capture machine, and says 1 Gbps of traffic can fill about 11 TB of disk a day.
• The same FAQ flags an HTTP compression bug in OpenSearch 2.19.0 that affects capture, and suggests disabling compression or moving to OpenSearch 3.x.

Official site: Arkime.

How to choose

When to stay with Wireshark

Keep Wireshark if your job is reading individual packets. None of the picks above gives you its packet-by-packet decode tree: tcpdump prints one line per packet, Zeek writes logs, NetworkMiner groups by host and file, and Sniffnet shows connections. Wireshark also costs nothing, has a native Windows Arm64 installer and ships Npcap in every Windows package. Many teams pair it with one tool from this list instead of replacing it, for example tcpdump or Pktmon to capture and Wireshark to read.

Frequently asked questions