Akvorado vs Caligare Flow Inspector

Akvorado is free network-flow software that receives NetFlow, IPFIX, and sFlow records, enriches them, and exposes the results through a web interface. Its inlet forwards incoming flows to Kafka. The outlet parses and augments them before sending data to ClickHouse. SNMP can supply exporter and interface details, while IPinfo or MaxMind can add geographic information. Optional BGP routes received through BMP contribute AS numbers, AS paths, and communities. A Grafana plugin is available, and the inlet, outlet, orchestrator, and console expose HTTP metrics. Written in Go, Akvorado is delivered as a single binary or Docker image, but deployment requires Kafka and ClickHouse. Recommended resources are 8 vCPUs, 100 GB disk, and 16 GB RAM, with AMD64 or ARM64 listed. The console expects an authenticating proxy to provide user headers. Relational data can use SQLite, MySQL, or PostgreSQL; without one, data remains in memory and disappears on restart. Downgrades are unsupported. The license is AGPLv3.

Caligare Flow Inspector analyzes NetFlow exports from existing routers, without requiring deployed probes. Its web-based management interface configures collectors, network devices, application groups and anomaly detection. The software provides real-time network analysis, user data tracking, and statistics for hosts, protocols, applications and conversations. Caligare says this visibility can help identify suspicious activity, denial-of-service attacks, worm-infected stations, bottlenecks and routing trouble. The free edition supports NetFlow versions 1, 5, 6, 7 and 9, along with low-level traffic search, interface utilization, maps, filtering and forwarding. It also offers local, LDAP or external authentication and user and group management. The free license is for non-commercial use and is limited to two devices, 24-hour history and 250 flows per second. Professional and Enterprise editions add longer-term trends, network anomaly detection, unrestricted NetFlow parsing and commercial use. Linux packages are listed; the latest version requires MySQL 5.1 or newer. A 30-day trial key can be requested by email.