Caligare Flow Inspector vs ntopng

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.

ntopng monitors network traffic gathered from traffic mirrors, NetFlow exporters, SNMP devices, firewall logs and intrusion detection systems. Its encrypted web interface supports real-time and historical traffic exploration. Protocol detection powered by nDPI covers more than 450 Layer-7 application protocols, while metrics include application latency, round-trip time, throughput, TCP retransmission, packet loss, and VoIP jitter and MOS. It captures packets with libpcap or PF_RING and collects flows from nProbe, NetFlow and sFlow exporters. An HTTP-based RESTful API and Lua scripting are listed. Platforms include Linux, FreeBSD, Windows x64, macOS and RaspbianOS; pfSense and OPNsense are also named among supported Unix platforms. The free Community edition suggests limits of 256 live local hosts, 128K live flows and eight monitored interfaces. Paid perpetual licenses include one year of maintenance: Pro is €299, paid once, Enterprise M is €699.95, paid once, Enterprise L is €899.95, paid once, and Enterprise XL is €1,499.95, paid once.