SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer vs Wireshark comparison

"What I like about SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is that it's useful for analyzing traffic. It also has an application visibility feature that lets you control applications."

"The dashboard alerts me when a critical device goes off the network."

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

"It doesn't cost too much."

"The solution helps manage networks."

"The support is excellent."

"What the network team found most valuable in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is that it helps them to troubleshoot or analyze the issue. For example, traffic that comes from our location: India, goes to the US, so for the network team to analyze where the traffic comes from and where it is directed, and whether the packets are being dropped, they use SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer. The network team also likes that through the solution, they can analyze the complete traffic utilization and how they're going to use it. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is user-friendly. The team finds it comfortable to use."

"This solution gives us important information about the utilization of protocols, particularly in terms of how often they are used."

"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."

"It has a good syntax to put the commands in and get information out of."

"Wireshark's best features are that it lets us see what traffic is in the network and what data should be encrypted."

"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."

"Setup is very easy. It's also possible to change source code and compile if you want to change something in the code, because it's free."

"If you're dealing with troubleshooting network, voice issues, or network operations, having a tool like Wireshark to dive into packet details is important. The initial setup is straightforward. Anyone starting out or looking to deploy it on your personal PC or machine can do it easily."

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

"It helps in analyzing if something looks suspicious, such as a brute force attack or scanning from somewhere."

"There is a lack of documentation ......as well as a lack of dashboards."

"What needs improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is performance because sometimes, my team struggles too much for the solution to perform correctly for a specific deployment in my organization. Having a more detailed view in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is another area for improvement, but that's more part of the protocol than the actual solution."

"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."

"It does not flow. It cannot do our metric performance monitoring. So it is very limited. They can do it but in a very limited fashion. It is only good for SNMP-based alerts."

"They should work on the configuration of the Log Analyzer feature."

"It can be complex to set up and configure."

"As people always complain about the pricing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, it's an area for improvement in the solution. People find it expensive. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is support, as it could be better."

"The solution’s user interface could be improved."

"The system could be improved upon by adding a better and more powerful data processing engine."

"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."

"I wish the filters were a little bit more prepopulated."

"The average person would probably find Wireshark hard to use. When I first installed it, I was overwhelmed by all the data it was shooting out. It doesn't make sense until you start doing some research and figure out what everything means. It isn't the most user-friendly tool. It just provides so much information."

"We'd like to be able to extract the output into an Excel table."

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

"Wireshark gets stuck when it is a larger file."

"NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is reasonably priced."

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

"For our environment, we pay approximately $25,000 USD yearly."

"The pricing is really good."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"Wireshark is open-source and free of charge."

"The solution is open source so is free."

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

"It's free."

"We are using a freeware version of this solution, so there are no licence costs involved."

"Wireshark is an open-source product, so it's free to use."

"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 is an open-source solution."