A-Packets vs Ettercap

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.

Ettercap is a free, open-source suite for man-in-the-middle testing, live connection sniffing and network analysis. It dissects protocols actively or passively, filters packet payloads through compiled etterfilter rules, and performs network and host analysis. Passive LAN scanning can extract host, operating-system, port and gateway information from observed traffic. Command-line, graphical and ncurses interfaces are available, along with PCAP support, remote capture, traffic decryption and flow analysis. The project lists Linux and macOS platforms and supports self-hosted deployment. Tested systems include Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Pentoo, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. The latest listed release is 0.8.4.1-Garofalo, released April 7, 2026, with a fix for an etterfilter heap out-of-bounds read identified as CVE-2026-3606. Downloads include SHA256 checksums. Source builds require libraries and tools such as libpcap, libnet, pthread, zlib, CMake, Flex and Bison. The project is community run under GPL-2.0.