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.



There are many alternatives to Wireshark for Windows if you are looking for a replacement. The best open source Windows alternative is tcpdump. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to Wireshark and 16 are open source and available for Windows so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source Windows alternatives to Wireshark are NetworkMiner, Ettercap, Termshark and Scapy.
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.



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.

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.

TraceWrangler is a network capture file toolkit running on Windows (or on Linux, using WINE) that supports PCAP as well as the new PCAPng file format, which is now the standard file format used by Wireshark.




Packetyzer provides a Windows user interface for the Ethereal packet capture and dissection library. Ethereal is used by network professionals around the world for troubleshooting, analysis, software and protocol development, and education.








Discover and capture container network traffic from your comfy desktop Wireshark, using a containerized service and a Wireshark plugin.


It's open source and use CLI