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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
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
117
Ranking in other categories
Network Management Applications (7th), Network Monitoring Software (21st), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (20th), DX NetOps (1st)
Wireshark
Ranking in Network Troubleshooting
4th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Troubleshooting category, the mindshare of DX Spectrum is 4.9%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Wireshark is 12.7%, down from 13.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Troubleshooting Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Wireshark12.7%
DX Spectrum4.9%
Other82.4%
Network Troubleshooting
 

Featured Reviews

Balabrahmam_Chakka - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Program Manager at Tata Consultancy Services
Comprehensive device monitoring enhances operational efficiency
DX Spectrum should have an automatic ticketing mechanism with ServiceNow. I need to use other tools for event management. It has a dashboarding mechanism and monitors devices and network switches through SNMP without an agent, which is good, but it should also have event management. Its LDAP authentication is fine. However, event management is not available, which is a concern. Not much else. If they can add event management, it would help. The event management should have more deduplication and alert correlation and check the bidirectional communication with ServiceNow. If a previous ticket is open and the same alert is generated, there's no need to create another ticket; updating the work notes would suffice. It should help reduce noise in alerting.
DonniUgalde - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior I.T. Systems Engineer at Pro Techs MSP
Provides visibility into the network, and the GUI is easy to use
I wish the filters were a little bit more prepopulated. It would have been easy to hit a drop-down and select a filter. If I only wanted to look at DCP, UDP, or IP, it would be easy to filter it out. Advanced network knowledge is required to get a lot out of the tool. However, it's very easy to install and deploy. It would be nice if there were some handheld Android devices with a Wireshark-specialized application that would allow us to mirror a Cisco port. Then, we can just plug into the port and click the green start button, and it will start ingesting the packet capture. Then, we won’t be using a laptop. The only downside is that we must have a laptop and connect a network cable. Some new laptops don't have network ports, so we have to get another adapter. Having an all-in-one device, like NetAlly or Fluke, and some of their network devices would be cool.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We were able to standardize the internal processes across all internal departments, resulting in almost an elimination of non-standard process flows through our organization."
"Some of the most valuable features are it's highly scalable, the carrier is great, and if something has SNMP, it can monitor it. It's a great network fault management solution."
"It creates transparency and makes everything work by being more transparent."
"All networks (or network equipment) are monitored through CA Spectrum."
"Scalability is a highly rated feature of this solution. It is better than some of the other tools that I've used in terms of scalability. We scaled it to tens of thousands of devices."
"Spectrum is great for root cause analysis. It has excellent correlation event management. Spectrum's stability and scalability are also amazing."
"We can monitor MPLS network VPN, network configuration, and backups. It's highly scalable for network configuration management."
"The quick notification of issues, quick alerting because timeliness is always valuable, it's very important for us."
"It gives us the ability to pinpoint problems and to communicate network problems with software and hardware vendors."
"It has a good syntax to put the commands in and get information out of."
"You can use Wireshark to see the traffic packet format, the IP layers, the fields, and the enabled flags."
"Being able to dissect email data and figure out what is inside email messages was the most valuable feature. Such a feature is pretty helpful for an ongoing forensic investigation or when there is a potential insider threat that you are trying to investigate. It allows you to see the network activity of the users you are investigating. It also gives you more visibility into your network. It was very easy to set up. There is a lot of information out there on Google and YouTube about how to use it. There is also community support. If you have any trouble, it is pretty easy to find an answer online. You will have to do some digging only if you have a very specific use case."
"Packet-capture files can be hard to use due to their size. Wireshark has a tool called tshark that can parse the files with out opening them so that you can take large captures, say 2-10GB, and return only relevant information."
"It's easy to troubleshoot issues because there's a large online community."
"Wireshark helps us to understand network traffic."
"It is a stable product. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten."
 

Cons

"The GIS map feature needs to be enhanced and synced with topology views of containers and global collections."
"Our consultant was four months on-site doing Spectrum setup and working through issues."
"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. They did a really good job of trying to make sure that you got one major alert and any of the subsequent devices downstream were just additions to that, but occasionally, the engine wouldn't properly catch the right things, and we used to get a flood of alerts."
"The upgrade process could be smoother. More of the steps around upgrading could be automated."
"Integration with some other tools, and integration with some Network Packet Broker, need some improvement."
"I would like to see better scalability, and maybe, a more intuitive user interface. ​"
"The product should provide performance management features."
"The platform is complicated to use."
"In the future, it would be nice to see color coding. It is just black and white."
"Wireshark is similar to an OS defense tool, meaning that it runs on an OS such as Ubuntu and Fedora, but I'm unsure if it's compatible with Windows or if it's a straightforward process to run it on Windows. Right now, my team needs to run Wireshark from a dongle to use it, so it's an OS-dependable tool, and that's an area for improvement. I was unable to use Wireshark on Windows, and I couldn't capture it, as I'm unsure how to configure the wireless card into monitoring mode on Windows. The process was straightforward on Linux, but it wasn't the case on Windows OS. It seems Wireshark isn't compatible with all OS. For example, you can analyze the log, and you can analyze it on the Windows server, but you can't do a capture in Windows. Configuring Wireshark for Windows isn't as easy as configuring it for Linux."
"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."
"There is a disadvantage when it comes to sampling intervals. Additionally, I've heard from a colleague that Wireshark might be less effective in the voice domain."
"The solution has a steep learning curve. There are so many filters and features that are frequently being updated, it takes research, experience and familiarity to be able to use them. It could be a lot more user-friendly."
"Wireshark is restricted when any sort of encryption is involved, such as XSL encryption or DLX."
"We'd like to be able to extract the output into an Excel table."
"A room for improvement in Wireshark is its ease of use for beginners. It could be better. Another room for improvement in the tool is for it to provide more details about the traffic load. At the moment, Wireshark is adequate for me, so there isn't anything I'd like added to it in its next version."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 depends on the license number. It is affordable."
"Spectrum is expensive."
"It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"In general, the license cost will be about 30% of the total TCO for this tool (hardware/support team, OS costs, and OS management)."
"The price is good enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive."
"The product, support, and maintenance are all expensive, which is another reason that we are switching to another solution."
"It is free."
"Wireshark is open source and gives great value and functionality to the network investigation."
"Wireshark is free software, so you can download it and use it for free with no licensing fees."
"Wireshark is free of charge, and there's no license involved."
"We are using a freeware version of this solution, so there are no licence costs involved."
"It is free to download and install. It runs on multiple platforms, so how can you go wrong?"
"I am using the free version of this solution."
"Wireshark is free software, so you don't have to pay any licensing fee. Individual people can use it and then donate to Wireshark."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Energy/Utilities Company
5%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise89
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about DX Spectrum?
The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DX Spectrum?
The price of DX Spectrum is not competitive when compared to other solutions, such as SolarWinds. The high price has caused us to lose many deals.
What needs improvement with DX Spectrum?
I would like to see improvements in making the interface more user-friendly. Many people find it not simple to use. One of the common customer complaints is about the alarm notifications. Currently...
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.
 

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: December 2025.
879,768 professionals have used our research since 2012.