Colasoft Capsa vs Termshark

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.

Termshark is a terminal interface for tshark, inspired by Wireshark, for inspecting saved packet captures and live network traffic. It can read pcap files and sniff live interfaces when tshark permits, then apply Wireshark display filters to either. Users can inspect and reassemble TCP and UDP flows, search packets, copy packet ranges, and view conversations involving Ethernet, IPv4, IPv6, UDP, and TCP. Version 2.4 added packet search and profiles for colors and columns. It supports 16-color, 256-color, and truecolor terminal modes. The project lists Linux, macOS, BSD variants, Android through Termux, and Windows, with precompiled executables available through GitHub releases. Termshark is aimed at remote debugging where a large capture can be examined on the remote machine rather than copied to a desktop. It is free and MIT licensed. Packet analysis requires tshark 1.10.2 or newer in PATH; the project notes that tshark has features Termshark does not expose.