Arkime vs Ettercap

Arkime is a free, open-source network analysis and session search tool that passively observes traffic and creates searchable session records. It parses layers 3–7 and indexes fields including protocols, DNS names, HTTP headers, TLS/JA4 fingerprints, file hashes, and GeoIP in OpenSearch or Elasticsearch. Operators can store full packets in standard PCAP format or use metadata-only capture, with rules to select traffic for saving. Users can search sessions, inspect packet data, and export results as PCAP or CSV. Cont3xt enriches supported indicators using commercial and OSINT sources, including VirusTotal, Censys, and Shodan; phone enrichment is limited to the U.S. Parliament groups clusters and displays cluster issues and Elasticsearch health. Capture can scale by adding machines or increasing CPU and disk. Arkime has no license fees or paid-only features. Installation guidance covers Linux, recommends Debian or Ubuntu LTS, and links to a container guide. OpenSearch or Elasticsearch is required for session metadata. Authentication options include basic, form, digest, header, and OIDC, while the project advises against anonymous authentication.

Ettercap is a free, open-source suite for man-in-the-middle testing, live connection sniffing and network analysis. It dissects protocols actively or passively, filters packet payloads through compiled etterfilter rules, and performs network and host analysis. Passive LAN scanning can extract host, operating-system, port and gateway information from observed traffic. Command-line, graphical and ncurses interfaces are available, along with PCAP support, remote capture, traffic decryption and flow analysis. The project lists Linux and macOS platforms and supports self-hosted deployment. Tested systems include Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Pentoo, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. The latest listed release is 0.8.4.1-Garofalo, released April 7, 2026, with a fix for an etterfilter heap out-of-bounds read identified as CVE-2026-3606. Downloads include SHA256 checksums. Source builds require libraries and tools such as libpcap, libnet, pthread, zlib, CMake, Flex and Bison. The project is community run under GPL-2.0.