Caligare Flow Inspector vs Noction Flow Analyzer

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.

Noction Flow Analyzer collects, stores, and presents network-traffic data for monitoring, reporting, capacity planning, and analysis. It supports NetFlow, J-Flow, sFlow, IPFIX, NetStream, SNMP, and BGP. Data Explorer filters flow data, while dashboards provide built-in or user-created visualizations. The software can detect abnormal flow patterns and use BGP FlowSpec to drop, throttle, or redirect attack traffic automatically or with moderation. Alert notifications can go by email, webhook, Slack, or Telegram. NFA runs on x86_64 with RHEL 8 or 9, or Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 LTS; a dedicated server is recommended, though a suitably specified virtual machine is supported. Level 3 aggregation is retained for 400 days. The monthly NFA license costs $299 a month and the yearly license $2,990 a year, each covering up to 10,000 flows per second, unlimited devices, interfaces, sites, and users, plus free 24/7 support.