Colasoft Capsa vs Zui

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.

Zui is a free desktop application for exploring, querying, and debugging data in Zed lakes. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with drag-and-drop ingest, schema inference, named queries, filters, and pivots. Users can preview and shape data while loading it; imported data is stored locally under the Zui data directory, and the application can also connect to a remote Zed lake.

For packet capture analysis, bundled Brimcap creates Zeek and Suricata summary logs, and Zui can extract packet flows. Packet views can correlate Zeek events with Suricata alerts and offer right-click queries to VirusTotal or whois. Bundled Suricata uses Emerging Threats Open rules by default and updates them when Zui launches while connected to the internet. The maker says releases are signed with a code signing certificate to indicate the installer came from Brim Data and has not been changed since it was built. Brim Data continues to publish legacy Zed and Zui releases and documentation while developing SuperDB. Linux updates require manually uninstalling and reinstalling; the installation guide points users to troubleshooting documentation and a public Slack community.