A-Packets vs Arkime

A-Packets analyzes PCAP and PCAPNG captures for incident response, forensics and protocol inspection. It reconstructs HTTP sessions, maps communicating hosts and services, examines wireless artifacts, extracts files, identifies credential exposure and flags suspicious events. The hosted analyzer accepts native capture files from tools such as Wireshark and tcpdump. Public analysis costs nothing, requires no signup and accepts uploads up to 25 MB, but the resulting page is public. Private workspace plans include reports and a REST API key: Starter Workspace (monthly) is $11.99 a month, Professional (monthly) is $24.99 a month, and Advanced (monthly) is $49.99 a month. Yearly workspaces are $99 a year, $199 a year and $399 a year, respectively. One-time packs cost $14.99 as a one-time purchase, $44.99, paid once or $99.99, paid once. Subscription analyses have permanent private storage; credit-pack reports are deleted after 30 days. OnPrem supports customer-controlled storage and air-gapped deployments, but analyzes captures case by case and does not decrypt TLS payloads, capture continuously or alert.

Arkime is a free, open-source network analysis and session search tool that passively observes traffic and creates searchable session records. It parses layers 3–7 and indexes fields including protocols, DNS names, HTTP headers, TLS/JA4 fingerprints, file hashes, and GeoIP in OpenSearch or Elasticsearch. Operators can store full packets in standard PCAP format or use metadata-only capture, with rules to select traffic for saving. Users can search sessions, inspect packet data, and export results as PCAP or CSV. Cont3xt enriches supported indicators using commercial and OSINT sources, including VirusTotal, Censys, and Shodan; phone enrichment is limited to the U.S. Parliament groups clusters and displays cluster issues and Elasticsearch health. Capture can scale by adding machines or increasing CPU and disk. Arkime has no license fees or paid-only features. Installation guidance covers Linux, recommends Debian or Ubuntu LTS, and links to a container guide. OpenSearch or Elasticsearch is required for session metadata. Authentication options include basic, form, digest, header, and OIDC, while the project advises against anonymous authentication.