Colasoft Capsa vs Malcolm

Colasoft Capsa is a Windows network analyzer for monitoring, analyzing and troubleshooting wired and wireless networks. The Enterprise edition captures packets in real time from local networks and can save transmitted data. It analyzes more than 1,800 protocols and sub-protocols, including VoIP, and displays packet details in Hex, ASCII and EBCDIC. Capsa can diagnose network problems and suggest solutions, monitor conversations, reconstruct packet streams and generate reports for selected items, the whole network or a particular network group. Its security analysis detects DoS and DDoS attacks, worm activity, ARP attacks, TCP port scans and suspicious conversations in real time. Users can set email or sound alerts and schedule capture once, daily or weekly. Capsa Free monitors up to 10 IP addresses, ends sessions after four hours and lacks WiFi connection monitoring. Professional is listed at $695, paid once for a single-seat perpetual license, one machine and one year of maintenance. Enterprise is $1,295, paid once and has a 30-day trial.

Malcolm is a free suite for network traffic analysis and security monitoring. It accepts PCAP files, Zeek logs and Suricata alerts through a browser interface, and can also receive live traffic through lightweight forwarders. Session data can be enriched with GeoIP, hardware-vendor, asset-inventory and JA4 fingerprinting lookups. Analysts can use prebuilt OpenSearch Dashboards or search and identify sessions with Arkime. Malcolm runs in containers and supports Docker, Podman and Kubernetes deployments; a standalone Debian-based installer ISO is also available. Analysis is accessed through a browser, and the project documents host setup for Linux, macOS and Windows. Authentication options include local accounts, LDAP, TLS certificates and Keycloak. The software provides a REST API and is released under Apache License 2.0. A deployment constraint is that rootless Podman cannot capture traffic on local network interfaces, though Malcolm can accept metadata forwarded from a network sensor appliance. The installer also formats all non-removable storage without warning.