dpkt vs traceroute-circl: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
dpkt is a free digital forensics and incident response tool. traceroute-circl is a free digital forensics and incident response tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best digital forensics and incident response fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of available product data, here is our conclusion:
Security engineers and incident responders who need to automate packet analysis at scale should reach for dpkt; it parses raw network captures 10x faster than manual inspection and strips away the learning curve of libpcap. With 1,151 GitHub stars and active use in SOC automation pipelines, dpkt proves itself in production environments where speed matters more than GUI hand-holding. Skip it if your team lacks Python skills or needs pre-built alerting rules; dpkt is a parsing library, not a detection platform.
CSIRT operators investigating DNS hijacking, BGP anomalies, and routing-layer incidents need traceroute-circl because it extends standard traceroute with ASN lookup, geolocation, and reverse DNS enrichment in a single pass. The tool is free and actively maintained on GitHub with enough adoption among European incident response teams to validate the approach. Skip this if your team expects a GUI or needs to correlate traceroute data with NetFlow and packet captures in a single platform; traceroute-circl is command-line only and designed to feed into your existing workflow, not replace it.
