Best Network Packet Capture Software in 2026

Capsa is aimed at network administrators and engineers in small businesses and enterprises who need packet capture and network diagnosis.

NetworkMiner

NetworkMiner is for people investigating captured or live network traffic, including incident response teams, law enforcement, companies, and organizations.

Sniffnet is intended for people who want to monitor network activity, including users who find other network analyzers difficult to understand.

Wireshark suits network professionals, security experts, developers, and educators who need to inspect captured traffic.

Termshark suits people debugging on remote machines who need to examine pcaps without copying them to a desktop.

Airtool Pi

It is aimed at WLAN and IT professionals who capture traffic with remote Linux sensors.

Malcolm

Malcolm suits security teams that need to examine network captures or live traffic and can operate a self-hosted deployment.

EndaceProbe

EndaceProbe suits security, network, and operations teams in sectors such as healthcare, finance, government, telecom, and broadcast.

nChronos suits medium and large corporate networks that need continuous capture, retrospective traffic analysis, alerts and scheduled reporting.

netsniff-ng suits Linux users doing packet capture, trace analysis, debugging, auditing, or network reconnaissance.

Omnipeek suits enterprises and service providers needing continuous packet analysis and troubleshooting.

It suits security, network, and IT teams investigating threats or diagnosing network and application issues from recorded traffic.

tcpdump suits users who need a command-line tool for network monitoring and packet capture.

TShark suits users who need command-line capture and protocol analysis on Linux, macOS, or Windows, including workflows that pipe output to other programs.

It suits Android users who want to inspect and capture traffic from the device itself without root access.

It suits threat hunters and security teams investigating network activity across on-premises and cloud environments.

SentryWire is designed for enterprise, federal, and ICS/OT networks, including critical infrastructure environments.