Ettercap vs NETCAP
Ettercap
ettercap-project.org
NETCAP
netcap.ioSide by side
| Figure | Ettercap | NETCAP |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | €49/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 3 |
| Spec score · Network Protocol Analyzers | 8.0 (#13) | 9.1 (#2) |
| Purpose | Ettercap is a suite for man-in-the-middle testing with live connection sniffing, on-the-fly content filtering, protocol dissection, and network and host analysis. | NETCAP converts network packet streams into structured audit records for network analysis, security research, machine learning, and forensics. |
Plans
In their own words
Ettercap
Ettercap is a free, open-source suite for man-in-the-middle testing, live connection sniffing and network analysis. It dissects protocols actively or passively, filters packet payloads through compiled etterfilter rules, and performs network and host analysis. Passive LAN scanning can extract host, operating-system, port and gateway information from observed traffic. Command-line, graphical and ncurses interfaces are available, along with PCAP support, remote capture, traffic decryption and flow analysis. The project lists Linux and macOS platforms and supports self-hosted deployment. Tested systems include Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Pentoo, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. The latest listed release is 0.8.4.1-Garofalo, released April 7, 2026, with a fix for an etterfilter heap out-of-bounds read identified as CVE-2026-3606. Downloads include SHA256 checksums. Source builds require libraries and tools such as libpcap, libnet, pthread, zlib, CMake, Flex and Bison. The project is community run under GPL-2.0.
NETCAP
NETCAP converts network packet streams into structured audit records for network analysis, security research, machine learning and forensics. Its free Core edition covers 66+ record types for protocols including TCP, UDP, HTTP, TLS, DNS and DHCP. Core captures live traffic, processes PCAP files, supports distributed collection and HTTP proxy capture, and outputs Protocol Buffers, CSV, JSON streams and Prometheus metrics. It is an open-source CLI under GPL-3.0, with platform binaries and Docker images.
Pro adds interactive graph analysis, a network activity timeline, investigation notes and more than 35 analysis modules. It can flag anomalies in decoded traffic and draft incident reports for editing; the maker says Pro analyzes captures locally without an upload step. Pro is available for macOS, Windows and Linux and includes email support. The plan is listed at $548 a month, with a €48/year option also shown, and a 14-day trial without a credit card. Enterprise has custom pricing and includes unlimited team seats, priority support with an SLA, custom integrations and volume licensing.