A-Packets vs Zui

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.

Zui is a free desktop application for exploring, querying, and debugging data in Zed lakes. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with drag-and-drop ingest, schema inference, named queries, filters, and pivots. Users can preview and shape data while loading it; imported data is stored locally under the Zui data directory, and the application can also connect to a remote Zed lake.

For packet capture analysis, bundled Brimcap creates Zeek and Suricata summary logs, and Zui can extract packet flows. Packet views can correlate Zeek events with Suricata alerts and offer right-click queries to VirusTotal or whois. Bundled Suricata uses Emerging Threats Open rules by default and updates them when Zui launches while connected to the internet. The maker says releases are signed with a code signing certificate to indicate the installer came from Brim Data and has not been changed since it was built. Brim Data continues to publish legacy Zed and Zui releases and documentation while developing SuperDB. Linux updates require manually uninstalling and reinstalling; the installation guide points users to troubleshooting documentation and a public Slack community.