Malcolm vs PacketSnitch

Malcolm is a free suite for network traffic analysis and security monitoring. It accepts PCAP files, Zeek logs and Suricata alerts through a browser interface, and can also receive live traffic through lightweight forwarders. Session data can be enriched with GeoIP, hardware-vendor, asset-inventory and JA4 fingerprinting lookups. Analysts can use prebuilt OpenSearch Dashboards or search and identify sessions with Arkime. Malcolm runs in containers and supports Docker, Podman and Kubernetes deployments; a standalone Debian-based installer ISO is also available. Analysis is accessed through a browser, and the project documents host setup for Linux, macOS and Windows. Authentication options include local accounts, LDAP, TLS certificates and Keycloak. The software provides a REST API and is released under Apache License 2.0. A deployment constraint is that rootless Podman cannot capture traffic on local network interfaces, though Malcolm can accept metadata forwarded from a network sensor appliance. The installer also formats all non-removable storage without warning.

PacketSnitch is a desktop application for investigating network traffic in PCAP and PCAPNG captures. It turns files into searchable, protocol-aware information and can extract hosts, credentials, certificates, files, locations, protocols, anomalies and threat-intelligence hits. Analysis tools include stream reconstruction, protocol decoding, complex filters, visualizations, threat-intelligence scoring, file carving, GeoIP enrichment and capture workspaces. Traffic decryption, flow analysis and CLI tools are also listed. ZIP-packaged plugins can be installed through Settings. The bundled Python backend parses captures locally, and the maker says captures are not uploaded. Optional network activity includes configured LLM calls, threat-intelligence lookups and anonymous metrics; metrics can be disabled in Settings. Optional LLM analysis supports Ollama, OpenRouter and Cohere when configured. New installations get full features in Demo mode for 30 days, then move to Free mode with core analysis and reduced functionality. Prebuilt installers are available for Windows 10/11 and Linux DEB or RPM distributions. macOS has no signed installer, though running from source is described. The maker says analysis outputs may not be accurate or complete and should be independently validated before consequential use.