tcpdump is a common packet analyzer that runs under the command line. It allows the user to intercept and display TCP/IP and other packets being transmitted or received over a network to which the computer is attached.



The best free alternative to Wireshark is tcpdump, which is also Open Source. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to Wireshark and many of them is free so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting free alternatives to Wireshark are Intercepter-NG, NetworkMiner, Ettercap and PCAPdroid.
tcpdump is a common packet analyzer that runs under the command line. It allows the user to intercept and display TCP/IP and other packets being transmitted or received over a network to which the computer is attached.



Intercepter-NG is a multifunctional network toolkit for various types of IT specialists.



NetworkMiner is a Network Forensic Analysis Tool (NFAT) for Windows. NetworkMiner can extract transmitted files and certificates from PCAP files containing HTTP, FTP, SMB, SMB2, TFTP and several other protocols.




Ettercap is a suite for man in the middle attacks on LAN. It features sniffing of live connections, content filtering on the fly and many other interesting tricks.

PCAPdroid is an android app to capture the phone traffic and analyze it remotely (e.g. via Wireshark). The traffic can be easily downloaded from a remote device thanks to the integrated HTTP server, or streamed to a remote UDP receiver.




MicroOLAP TCPDUMP is a clone of tcpdump , the most used network sniffer/analyzer for UNIX, compiled with the original tcpdump code (http://www.tcpdump.org/), and MicroOLAP Packet Sniffer SDK.

Sysdig is open source, system-level exploration: capture system state and activity from a running Linux instance, then save, filter and analyze. Think of it as strace + tcpdump + lsof + awesome sauce.

Mojo Packets™ is web based tool that simplifies trace based analysis and troubleshooting of connectivity/performance issues observed in Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) environments.




NetHogs is a small 'net top' tool. Instead of breaking the traffic down per protocol or per subnet, like most tools do, it groups bandwidth by process.

It's open source and use CLI