NIKSUN® NikOS Everest™ vs PacketStreamer: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
NIKSUN® NikOS Everest™ is a commercial digital forensics and incident response tool by NIKSUN. PacketStreamer 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 NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Enterprise security teams investigating advanced breaches need NikOS Everest for its packet-level forensics depth; most tools give you alerts, this one gives you the actual network conversation that proves what happened. Query response time improved 4X in version 5.1, and the platform maps cleanly to NIST DE.CM and DE.AE for detection and analysis, though it prioritizes forensic investigation over automated response actions. Mid-market buyers should verify their network capture and storage budget before committing; this is a specialist tool for organizations with the ops maturity to run on-premises packet infrastructure, not a replacement for broader network monitoring.
Cloud security teams performing incident response in containerized environments should adopt PacketStreamer for its ability to capture packets remotely across distributed workloads without deploying agents to every node. The tool's 1,927 GitHub stars and zero licensing cost make it practical for forensics-heavy shops that need to preserve traffic for post-incident analysis across Kubernetes clusters. Skip this if your team expects a turnkey UI or wants packet capture integrated into a larger SIEM; PacketStreamer is deliberately purpose-built for packet collection, not visualization or correlation.
