Best Free Packet Capture Tools

Capture all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet with Telerik Fiddler HTTP(S) proxy. Inspect traffic, set breakpoints, and fiddle with requests & responses. Fiddler Everywhere is a web debugging proxy for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Capture, inspect, monitor all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet, mock requests, and diagnose network issues. Fiddler Everywhere can be used for any browser, application, process. Debug traffic from macOS, Windows, or Linux systems and iOS or Android mobile devices. Ensure the proper cookies, headers, and cache directives are transferred between the client and server. Supports any framework, including .NET, Java, Ruby, etc. Mock or modify requests and responses on any website. It’s a quick and easy way to change the request and responses to test websites without changing code. Use Fiddler Everywhere to log all HTTP/S traffic between your computer and the Internet.

Tcpdump is a powerful command-line packet analyzer that allows users to display the contents of network packets transmitted or received over a network to which the computer is attached. It operates on most Unix-like systems, including Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS, utilizing the libpcap library for network traffic capture. Tcpdump can read packets from a network interface card or from a previously created saved packet file, and it provides options to write packets to standard output or a file. Users can apply BPF-based filters to limit the number of packets processed, enhancing usability on networks with high traffic volumes. The tool is distributed under the BSD license, making it free software. In many operating systems tcpdump is available as a native package or port, which simplifies installation of updates and long-term maintenance.

Arkime is an open source, large-scale, full packet capturing, indexing, and database system designed to augment existing security infrastructure by storing and indexing network traffic in standard PCAP format. It offers full network visibility, facilitating the swift identification and resolution of security and network issues. Security teams gain access to the necessary network visibility data essential for responding to and investigating incidents to expose the full attack scope. Designed to be deployed across multiple clustered systems, Arkime provides the ability to scale to hundreds of gigabits per second. It allows security analysts to respond, reconstruct, investigate, and confirm information about the threats within your network, enabling appropriate responses quickly and precisely. As an open-source platform, Arkime provides users with the benefits of transparency, cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and community support.

NetworkMiner is a network forensics tool that extracts artifacts such as files, images, emails, and passwords from captured network traffic in PCAP files. It can also capture live network traffic by sniffing a network interface. Detailed information about each IP address in the analyzed network traffic is aggregated into a network host inventory, which can be used for passive asset discovery and to get an overview of communicating devices. NetworkMiner is primarily designed to run on Windows but can also be used on Linux. Since its first release in 2007, it has become a popular tool among incident response teams and law enforcement and is used by companies and organizations worldwide.

Sniffnet is a network monitoring tool designed to help users easily keep track of their Internet traffic. Whether gathering statistics or inspecting in-depth network activities, Sniffnet provides comprehensive coverage. It emphasizes user experience, ensuring ease of use compared to other cumbersome network analyzers. Completely free and open source, Sniffnet is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, with the full source code available on GitHub. Developed entirely in Rust, it leverages this modern programming language to build efficient and reliable software, emphasizing performance and safety. Key features include selecting a network adapter to inspect, applying filters to observed traffic, viewing overall statistics and real-time charts of Internet traffic, exporting comprehensive capture reports as PCAP files, identifying over 6,000 upper-layer services, protocols, trojans, and worms, discovering domain names and ASNs of hosts, pinpointing connections in the local network.

EtherApe is a graphical network monitor for Unix systems, modeled after Etherman, that displays network activity graphically, with hosts and links changing in size based on traffic volume and color-coded protocols. It supports various devices, including FDDI, ISDN, PPP, SLIP, and WLAN, as well as several encapsulation formats. Users can filter displayed traffic and capture data live from the network or read from a file. Node statistics can be exported for further analysis. The tool offers link layer, IP, and TCP modes, allowing users to focus on specific protocol stack levels. It provides detailed information on each node and link, including protocol breakdown and traffic statistics. EtherApe is open source software released under the GNU General Public License. A single node can be centered on the display and several user-chosen nodes can be arranged in an inner circle with other nodes around. An alternative display mode arranges nodes in "columns".

WinDump is the Windows version of tcpdump, the command line network analyzer for UNIX. WinDump is fully compatible with tcpdump and can be used to watch, diagnose and save to disk network traffic according to various complex rules. It can run under Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista. WinDump captures using the WinPcap library and drivers, which are freely downloadable from the WinPcap website. WinDump supports 802.11b/g wireless capture and troubleshooting through the Riverbed AirPcap adapter. WinDump is free and is released under a BSD-style license. WinDump is able to use the interfaces exported by WinPcap. WinDump can run on all the operating systems supported by WinPcap. WinDump is the porting of tcpdump. It is possible to launch more than one session (on the same network adapter or on different adapters). Except for the increased CPU load, there are no drawbacks in using multiple applications at the same time.

In today's bandwidth unconstrained, encrypted, cloud-centric networks you can no longer separate traffic analytics from security and investigation activities. Trisul helps organizations of all sizes deploy full-spectrum deep network monitoring which can serve as a single goto source of truth for performance monitoring, network design, security analytics, threat detection, and compliance. Traditional approaches based on SNMP, Netflow, Agents, or Packet Capture have a narrow focus and rigid vendor-supplied analytics. Trisul is the only platform that provides a rich and open platform you can innovate upon. Includes a tightly integrated backend datastore and a web UI. Yet, open enough to plug into a different backend or to drive Kibana, Grafana UIs. Our design goal is to pack as much performance as we can in a single node. For larger networks scale out by adding more probes and hubs.

Wireshark is the world’s foremost and widely-used network protocol analyzer. It lets you see what’s happening on your network at a microscopic level and is the de facto (and often de jure) standard across many commercial and non-profit enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions. Wireshark development thrives thanks to the volunteer contributions of networking experts around the globe and is the continuation of a project started by Gerald Combs in 1998. Wireshark® is a network protocol analyzer. It lets you capture and interactively browse the traffic running on a computer network. It has a rich and powerful feature set and is world’s most popular tool of its kind. It runs on most computing platforms including Windows, macOS, Linux, and UNIX. Network professionals, security experts, developers, and educators around the world use it regularly. It is freely available as open source, and is released under the GNU General Public License version 2.