Colasoft Capsa vs TShark

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.

TShark is the Wireshark project's terminal-mode utility for capturing and analyzing network traffic. It can capture live packets or read saved captures, decode packet data for output, and write captures to a file. Its native capture format is pcapng, and it can read and write formats supported by Wireshark. Display filters use Wireshark syntax to select packets and protocol fields. Output formats include fields, JSON, PDML, and text; capture controls include interface selection, capture filters, packet limits, and ring-buffer files. TShark can write ElasticSearch mapping data or pipe packet output to another program or script. One constraint is that display filters are unavailable when capturing and saving packets with the -w option. The manual sets a 2 TB maximum capture-file size and notes potential issues above 2^32 packets. The Wireshark project is maintained by the Wireshark Foundation, a nonprofit supported by donations. TShark is free under GNU GPL version 2 and runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.