Colasoft Capsa vs PCAPdroid

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.

PCAPdroid is an open-source Android network capture and monitoring tool that works without root privileges. It uses Android VpnService to receive app traffic, then processes it locally without creating an external VPN. Its connection view shows protocol, ports, addresses, status and traffic volume. Captures can be saved as PCAP files or sent remotely for analysis, and the app supports offline trace analysis, display filters and command-line capture. It can decrypt HTTPS/TLS traffic for a specific app, subject to Android certificate trust limitations. The free plan covers core monitoring and capture; paid features add a firewall for blocking apps, domains and IP addresses with configurable rules and allowlists, as well as malware detection using third-party blacklists and PCAPng format. PCAPdroid supports real-time PCAP-over-IP analysis with tools such as Wireshark, ntopng and tcpdump. In non-root mode it captures only outgoing connections started by the device running it, not traffic from other devices on the network. The project says it collects no information and processes traffic locally.