Aircrack-ng vs Cairn
Aircrack-ng
aircrack-ng.orgCairn
cairnsecurity.comSide by side
| Figure | Aircrack-ng | Cairn |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $99/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Penetration Testing Software | 8.3 (#7) | 7.8 (#15) |
| Purpose | Aircrack-ng is a suite of tools for assessing Wi-Fi network security. | Cairn combines pentest scoping, statements of work, reporting, and a client portal in one platform. |
| Support | The project directs users to its wiki, tool documentation, manpages, FAQ, troubleshooting pages, forum, and IRC, and says it does not provide support over email. | Cairn lists community support for Starter, priority support for Team, and priority support plus SLA for Business; its contact page says it usually answers within a business day. |
Plans
Cairn
- Starter$99 a month
- Team$149 a month
- Business$249 a month
- On-prem & air-gapped$30,000 a year
In their own words
Aircrack-ng
Aircrack-ng is a free suite of command-line tools for assessing Wi-Fi network security. It captures packets and exports data to text files for processing with third-party tools, and checks wireless cards and drivers for capture and injection capabilities. The toolset also covers frame injection and replay, monitor-mode control, wireless-network graphing, and cracking WEP and WPA PSK keys, including WPA 1 and 2. The project says its command-line format allows heavy scripting. Aircrack-ng is open source under GPL v2, BSD 3 Clause, and OpenSSL licenses, and can be compiled without OpenSSL. It runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted deployments, with significant caveats for Windows: compatibility is only with Airpcap, and the Windows 1.7 download requires users to develop their own wireless-card DLLs, which are not included or supported. Chipset support is also incomplete, and some functions may not work even with a supported chipset. The downloads page lists version 1.7. Only the latest stable release is supported. The project directs users to documentation and community channels, not email support, and warns against accessing networks that do not belong to them.