SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer vs Wireshark comparison

"It is great at telling you if your devices are working and it keeps an eye on your network's overall performance."

"What people found most valuable in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is its report customization feature."

"What I like the most is the bandwidth assessment."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to look for any increases in bandwidth over time so that we can plan before it becomes critical."

"For managing the traffic, it provides you a response about whether the traffic is down, up, or heavy, which is a very powerful feature. It has a good response time. We have been using this solution for many years, and we don't have any problem with this solution."

"I like that it is able to monitor multiple devices and it's vendor-agnostic."

"The bandwidth indicates the utilization of the devices; if any issue occurs, it triggers an alert for me."

"We conduct network traffic analysis for a couple of key reasons. First, we look for traffic anomalies, such as unexpected increases or decreases in network traffic within specific segments. This helps us determine if the network needs to be re-architected."

"Wireshark is a good tool to start with network analyzing and packet capturing."

"The GUI is easy to use."

"What's best about Wireshark is that it doesn't require installation. It supports cards and monitoring permissions and is sufficient for appending and capturing activities. You won't need to install other tools to use Wireshark, so this saves you time. You can capture packets at any time from your laptop through Wireshark."

"I have found the most valuable feature you can design your sniffer the way you want to."

"Wireshark saves a lot of time, especially with network troubleshooting."

"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."

"I find Wireshark a very useful tool. Its best feature is that it allows me to deeply understand what's going on at the packet level, as well as any adverse signatures that I can analyze. When I need to create an IPS rule, I need to check the traffic deeply to get more insights about the actual traffic, what's the name of certain flags, etc., and I'm able to do all that through Wireshark. The tool is also user-friendly."

"The options that are required to get the details for the packet drops are good."

"I would like to see more training videos and additional material for learning how to use this solution."

"Currently, it shows only the top ten applications or ports in use, while the remaining data appears as 'remaining traffic,' causing confusion."

"An area for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is the dashboarding. The user interface also has room for improvement because it's currently clunky."

"I would like to see better customization capabilities."

"Deployment needs improvement. The process is complicated, requiring attention to infrastructure settings and installation of components like the origin application server, platform, close storage, and policy agents."

"It is a scalable solution, but it is costly to scale. Therefore, I would rate scalability at eight out of ten."

"I'm expecting to see a little bit more artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. They need a bit more sophistication in that."

"The Atlas module that is used for building the network map is very bad."

"Wireshark's UI isn't easy to handle and doesn't have as nice a view as Omnipeek."

"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."

"Wireshark is restricted when any sort of encryption is involved, such as XSL encryption or DLX."

"It is difficult to scale this solution."

"Sometimes I need to use tcpdump when I need to check the packets on CLI."

"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."

"Wireshark could make the filtering rules easier to apply and offer a drag-and-drop option as opposed to type and text."

"It needs the ability to follow multiple interfaces for specific traffic from different network zones/virtual networks. It would help to understand how any packet is going through the network."

"Pricing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is very high. I have a customer that needs the solution but doesn't have the budget for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer because the problem is that you can't use the solution only. You have to buy requirements such as the SolarWinds NPM first, and some companies don't have the budget for all the required components and modules. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer can cost up to $10,000, and some customers don't have that budget. Another product has all the modules that SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer has, with a very low price, that can be a replacement, which is ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer. PRTG is another solution that can replace SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer."

"NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is reasonably priced."

"The solution's licensing is high-priced."

"I don't have information on the licensing cost for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer because it's bundled with another SolarWinds solution. My organization has seven different models and pays for the license yearly. My organization also had to deploy additional pollers, but the cost wasn't very expensive, though I can't give the exact numbers."

"We have licenses for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer. In terms of pricing, its license is not that expensive versus other tools such as HP."

"The licensing for this solution is based on the number of nodes."

"While the pricing is fair, it could be better."

"Licensing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is paid yearly, and there are no additional costs that you need to pay apart from the standard licensing fees because you don't need to purchase another solution to make SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer work. Pricing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is more expensive than other solutions."

"Wireshark is free of charge, and there's no license involved."

"It is free."

"I've never personally had to pay for it, making it a highly valuable internet resource that's accessible for use. While they offer some paid versions, our firm has utilized the free version for the past three years."

"Wireshark is free software, so you don't have to pay any licensing fee. Individual people can use it and then donate to Wireshark."

"It's free."

"I am using the free version of this solution."

"Wireshark is open source and gives great value and functionality to the network investigation."

"It's a stand-alone tool. If there is a commercial license for it I am unaware of it."