Colasoft Capsa vs Wireshark
Colasoft Capsa
colasoft.comWireshark
wireshark.orgSide by side
| Figure | Colasoft Capsa | Wireshark |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 6 | 2 |
| Spec score · Network Packet Capture Software | 8.9 (#2) | 8.2 (#6) |
| Spec score · Network Troubleshooting Software | 9.1 (#2) | 8.2 (#5) |
| Spec score · Network Packet Analyzer Software | 8.9 (#4) | 8.3 (#10) |
| Spec score · Network Protocol Analyzers | 9.0 (#4) | 8.2 (#10) |
| Company facts | Gartner describes Colasoft as a private company founded in 2001, headquartered in Kowloon, China, with 501–1000 employees. | LinkedIn describes the Wireshark Foundation as a San Francisco nonprofit in computer and network security with a stated company size of 2–10 employees. |
| Documentation | The vendor provides version 15.1 user guide, datasheet, technical specifications and whitepaper documents. | Official material includes a User’s Guide, Developer’s Guide, wiki, FAQ, Q&A site, issue tracker and user/developer mailing lists. |
| Licence | The EULA describes copyrighted proprietary software with perpetual single-seat and five-seat licensing and prohibits reverse engineering or redistribution of full versions. | Wireshark is open source under GNU GPL version 2 or later, with source code available for modification and redistribution under the licence. |
| Purpose | Capsa is a portable network analyzer for monitoring, analyzing, and troubleshooting wired and wireless networks. | Wireshark captures and interactively browses network traffic as a network protocol analyzer. |
| Rating on Capterra | Capterra lists Capsa at 0.0 out of 5 from 0 user reviews. | 4.6 out of 5 from 51 reviews. |
| Rating on G2 | Colasoft Capsa is rated 4.5 out of 5 from 1 review. | 4.7 out of 5 from 148 reviews. |
| Rating on TrustRadius | Capsa scores 9 out of 10 from 1 review. | 8.9 out of 10 from 154 reviews and ratings. |
| Support | Colasoft maintenance includes priority email support, free product updates, and access to prerelease products during the maintenance period. | Community support is available through the Q&A site and Wireshark users mailing list. |
| VoIP analysis | Its VoIP module reports call statistics, control and media flows, jitter, packet loss and MOS-related diagnostics. | The product includes tools for analyzing Voice over IP communications. |
| What it does | Capsa is a Windows LAN and WLAN analyzer for real-time packet capture, traffic monitoring, protocol analysis and network troubleshooting. | Wireshark captures and interactively examines traffic moving across computer networks for troubleshooting, analysis, development and education. |
Plans
Colasoft Capsa
- Capsa FreeFree
- Capsa FreeFree
- Capsa Standard$295, paid once
- Capsa Professional$695, paid once
- Capsa Enterprise$995, paid once
- Capsa Enterprise$1,295, paid once
In their own words
Colasoft Capsa
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.
Wireshark
Wireshark is a free network protocol analyzer for capturing and examining network traffic. It supports live capture and offline analysis through a graphical interface or the TShark terminal utility, and can inspect hundreds of protocols. Display filters narrow what appears during analysis, though their syntax differs from capture filters. Wireshark reads and writes capture formats including pcap and pcapng, and can decompress gzip-compressed files. Analysis features include VoIP tools, packet coloring rules, and exports to XML, PostScript, CSV, or plain text. It can decrypt traffic for protocols including IPsec, Kerberos, SSL/TLS, WEP, and WPA/WPA2. The software is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows under GNU General Public License version 2, with no license fee for the full version. Windows packages include Npcap, which is needed for live packet capture. What a capture can show depends on the operating system, capture library, network interface, and network configuration; switched networks may not expose unicast traffic between other ports. Community help is available through a Q&A site and users mailing list.