Aircrack-ng vs w3af
Aircrack-ng
aircrack-ng.orgw3af
w3af.orgSide by side
| Figure | Aircrack-ng | w3af |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Penetration Testing Software | 8.3 (#7) | 8.2 (#11) |
| Platforms | The project says it works primarily on Linux and also lists Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, and eComStation 2. | The installation guide says w3af has been tested on Linux distributions, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD; it does not recommend or support Windows installation. |
| Purpose | Aircrack-ng is a suite of tools for assessing Wi-Fi network security. | w3af is an open-source web application security scanner for developers and penetration testers to identify and exploit vulnerabilities. |
| 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. | For installation issues, the guide directs users to create a ticket and include their Linux distribution, dependency-install script, pip freeze output, and Python version. |
Plans
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.
w3af
w3af is a free, open-source web application security scanner for vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. It can identify more than 200 vulnerabilities, including cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and OS command injection. Its workflow starts with crawler plugins that find URLs and injection points, continues with audit plugins that check for vulnerabilities, and can use attack plugins to exploit findings. Other plugin types cover infrastructure detection, request and response analysis, output, brute force, request modification, and evasion.
Users can scan and analyze results in a GTK graphical interface or a console. Web application payloads can interact with Metasploit when an exploit provides exec() capability. Developers can use the REST API from development languages and run it in Docker; scripts and the API also support automation. The project documents Linux and macOS installation, including running in Docker without installing w3af dependencies. It is available for Linux, macOS, web, API, and self-hosted deployment. REST API traffic over HTTP is unencrypted, so the documentation recommends added protection such as an SSL proxy for publicly reachable deployments.