cPacket Security Solutions vs FirstWave opFlow: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

cPacket Security Solutions

Mid-market and enterprise security teams dealing with encrypted traffic and multi-cloud packet visibility should start here; cPacket Security Solutions delivers lossless 200Gbps capture with zero packet drop (third-party verified) and agentless deployment, which means you get forensic completeness without touching your infrastructure. The platform excels at the front end of your detection pipeline, covering DE.CM and DE.AE in NIST CSF 2.0, but it's a packet broker and observability layer, not an incident response platform, so you'll still need NDR or SIEM to act on what it finds. Skip this if your team lacks the infrastructure expertise to integrate packet intelligence into existing security tools or if you're looking for a turnkey detection solution without integration work.

FirstWave opFlow

Network teams operating flat or poorly segmented infrastructure will get immediate value from opFlow's conversation heat maps and top-talker identification, which expose traffic patterns that traditional NetFlow tools bury in tables. The tool ingests five major flow protocols (Cisco NetFlow, NSEL, Juniper J-Flow, sFlow, IPFIX) natively without connectors, so deployment friction stays low. Skip this if you need behavioral baselining or threat correlation tied to endpoint identity; opFlow is a network-layer visibility tool, not an NDR platform that fuses flows with log aggregation or asset context.