Andrisoft Wansight vs Caligare Flow Inspector

Andrisoft Wansight monitors, analyzes, and accounts for network traffic for NOC and IT operations teams. It does not provide DDoS detection or mitigation. Flow Sensors process flow data such as NetFlow, sFlow, jFlow, NetStream, and IPFIX, while Packet Sensors inspect traffic from mirror ports, TAPs, and in-line links. Analytics include graphs by IP, subnet, and IP group, decoder reports, top lists, and 95th-percentile accounting.

The Flow Collector can search, filter, and export flows, and Packet Tracer displays packet captures in a Wireshark-like view. Reports can cover periods from five seconds to ten years and be emailed on a schedule as PDF or Excel. Linux packages run on customer servers, with a web Console for centralized management, scoped customer and department views, role-based profiles, and white-label branding. The Console also supports SAML 2.0, LDAP, Active Directory, RADIUS, REST API, CLI, and scripts. The one-year Sensor license costs $345 a year for one Packet Sensor or one Flow Sensor, monitoring only. A reviewed request can qualify for a free 30-day evaluation license.

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.