NIKSUN® NikOS Everest™ vs pcapfex: 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. pcapfex 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.
Incident response teams with limited budgets who need to extract files from pcap files during investigations should reach for pcapfex, a free tool that does one job without bloat. It's actively maintained on GitHub with 222 stars and requires no licensing overhead or integration complexity. Skip it if your team expects a GUI or needs to automate file extraction at scale; pcapfex is CLI-driven and built for analysts who prefer command-line forensics workflows.
