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DX Spectrum vs Wireshark comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 11, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

DX Spectrum
Ranking in Network Troubleshooting
6th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
118
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (8th), Network Monitoring Software (17th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (20th), DX NetOps (1st)
Wireshark
Ranking in Network Troubleshooting
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
64
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Network Troubleshooting category, the mindshare of DX Spectrum is 7.0%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Wireshark is 18.4%, up from 14.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Troubleshooting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Wireshark18.4%
DX Spectrum7.0%
Other74.6%
Network Troubleshooting
 

Featured Reviews

PinchasAlbalya - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Monitoring has become centralized and management now sees real‑time health of key network assets
The time investment required is significant, not because of difficulty but because of the need for free time to invest in it. We need to get the knowledge. We know there are many options, but we took an external vendor to install and make the customization. If we want to make others changes without paying for customization, we need to learn it deeply by ourselves. The tutorials are very complicated. They could work on that area. The tutorial part could be more simplified. I know there are many explanations, and you can get help or documents in one click on the current page in the product, but it is not very clear. If you want to do something new that you did not see from the vendor in the installation, it is not very simple. The documents are good for people that know how to operate the product well, but for new users, it is not simple.
reviewer2837244 - PeerSpot reviewer
It System Engineer at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Packet analysis has improved real-time troubleshooting and simplifies mapping complex data flows
The best features that Wireshark offers are everything. Every time I look into Wireshark, I find something new. The ability to capture real-time packets and understand how the packet is working and moving through how many hops and to how many points it reaches makes it a wonderful tool. The specific feature I use most is capturing packets of real-time communication and seeing how the packet is working. I rely on all the filters it has to check the protocols and see the communication between one end and another end and what the hops in between are, and if there is a proxy, how it behaves. Everything helps us check out the issue and troubleshoot it. I do not have anything additional to add about the features; everything looks really fine. The graphics are also good, and you can change its graphical features, making it a pretty nice tool. You can also use it with the PCAP file, which is really nice. Wireshark has positively impacted my organization by giving us the ability to capture packets and see into the network how it is working and what we can clarify about the network, specifically how we can remove many hops in the communication channels. A specific example of a measurable outcome is that we have a few switches in our network that, when we use Wireshark analysis, we find should not be needed or can be replaced with automatic switches instead of manual switches, such as switches which do not have any active features and only passive switches. That has saved us a lot of time.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The event management that the tool provides is extremely powerful, but with that comes a bit of complexity."
"The way our network is structured, CA Spectrum seems to be able to deal with problems that we have coming up in real time."
"This is a very powerful tool with a lot of functionality."
"It's a good tool; it's simple to do the configuration and has good discovery and integration."
"I must say, CA is an excellent company and their client always comes first."
"We were able to clearly identify the root cause of incidents visually and with specimen alerts with the topology design."
"Implemented with Enterprise Customers across region, it is a very strong fault management tool with extraordinary correlation and alarming."
"Spectrum is our correlation engine and an integration point of external monitoring tools."
"Wireshark has been getting better and better in the time I've been using it and it is a very helpful tool."
"Wireshark does exactly what I want and leaves me with no need to look elsewhere."
"Wireshark has a lot of features. It's a powerful tool if you're familiar with it. You can see everything on the network with it."
"Wireshark is the world's most powerful network protocol analyzer tool."
"It is a stable product. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature is the traffic gate, which shows which IPs are getting more bandwidth or traffic."
"The drill-down available for packet analysis is great. It gives a network security engineer insight into what is going on at the packet level and enables better troubleshooting."
"The best part about Wireshark, in my opinion, is its ability to analyze packet capture files."
 

Cons

"Technical support for this product is not so good. It needs improvement."
"For my use case, incident coordination was an area of improvement. The internal software engine for coordinating outages could use improvement because sometimes, we used to get false alerts for unrelated devices."
"Stability could be improved. I find on a regular basis that those of us on-call tend to usually have to go in and restart or reboot a Spectrum server because the landscape's gone down."
"We're trying to replace this solution with another product because it's too expensive and not very user-friendly; it requires training and takes some time to learn how to use it."
"I’d like to see better access to data elements via the API as well as better elements for the UIs."
"Once something goes down, that is when we get alerted versus we need more predictive analytics in place so we know a case based on patterns putting AI in place, or something along those lines, so we know that there is a pattern growing that the systems going to go down."
"I only encountered stability issues in very rare situations; mainly when we used our own extensions for private management modules."
"There appears to be no intelligence within Spectrum itself, for example if we were to move a network device to a different switch port, it will see the neighbor as being available, but the link or switch port as down."
"In the future, it would be nice to see color coding. It is just black and white."
"It would be better if they offered a hybrid version like My Cloud Control."
"The Wireshark search function shows green for a correct search and red for an incorrect search."
"Bigger memory footprint."
"Running Wireshark through an admin account for multiple exploits is unsecured."
"The Wireshark search function shows green for a correct search and red for an incorrect search. If there were a way to provide a description about what a search - and the similar ones which are available - can do, while a person is typing it, it would make the product easier to use and simultaneously decrease the learning curve."
"Sometimes I need to use tcpdump when I need to check the packets on CLI."
"Wireshark's UI isn't easy to handle and doesn't have as nice a view as Omnipeek."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Currently, a perpetual license but some services are moving to a subscription"
"The cost of some of these products are a little cost prohibitive, which is unfortunate. We have to find lower cost solutions for some of the things that we have to pull in. For the most part, CA has capabilities in pretty much everything that you would need. You just have to figure out where are you going to spend the most money for what you have to actually get done. You can do all these things but, which ones do you have to do? And that's hard to choose sometimes because you want to do them all."
"DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"It is very pricey. With the current trend of enterprises moving towards cheaper and more modern looking solutions like ManageEngine, SevOne, ServicePilot, and Paesller."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"The product, support, and maintenance are all expensive, which is another reason that we are switching to another solution."
"The price is good enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive."
"It is an open-source solution."
"I am using the free version of this solution."
"Wireshark is open source and gives great value and functionality to the network investigation."
"It is free to download and install. It runs on multiple platforms, so how can you go wrong?"
"It's free."
"The solution is open source so is free."
"We're using the free version of Wireshark."
"The tool is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise90
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise29
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with DX Spectrum?
The time investment required is significant, not because of difficulty but because of the need for free time to invest in it. We need to get the knowledge. We know there are many options, but we to...
What is your primary use case for DX Spectrum?
The university purchased DX Spectrum, called ICE. DX Spectrum NAC is working for us only on Cisco 9200 switches. It is not working on any other switch like C1000 or HG or any 2960X. Even other Cisc...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Wireshark?
Wireshark is priced at a medium range, not too high, not too low. The pricing could be more flexible, and they might make it more expensive. That said, compared to other products, it is competitive.
What needs improvement with Wireshark?
The speed of the Internet could be improved, especially its performance. Performance can sometimes be a challenge due to numerous factors.
What is your primary use case for Wireshark?
We are using Wireshark for inspecting the vertical line to know the data flow in and out of the cables. This is to determine if there is real traffic flow through the physical connections or not. A...
 

Also Known As

CA Spectrum
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
Comversion, ADP, Talbots
Find out what your peers are saying about DX Spectrum vs. Wireshark and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
896,563 professionals have used our research since 2012.