Packet Capture (cStor®) vs Stenographer: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Packet Capture (cStor®) is a commercial digital forensics tool by cPacket Networks. Stenographer is a free digital forensics tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best digital forensics fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, integrations, company size fit, here is our conclusion:
Enterprise and mid-market security teams investigating protocol-level incidents will find Packet Capture (cStor®) invaluable for its lossless capture at 10–200 Gbps paired with petabyte-scale persistent storage, letting you replay and forensically analyze traffic weeks or months after compromise. The onboard indexing and Wireshark integration mean you're not shipping raw PCAPs offsite for analysis; incident response happens at wire speed with full packet fidelity. This is deliberate forensics tooling, not a detection platform; if you need real-time threat hunting or automated anomaly flagging across the network, you'll want this feeding data to a separate NDR layer.
Security teams doing incident response and threat hunting need Stenographer for one reason: it captures full packets at line rate without dropping traffic, which means you actually have the forensic record when you need it. A 1,800-star GitHub project with active use in production environments shows it handles sustained high-volume capture on modest hardware. Skip this if your team expects a GUI, query language, or built-in analytics; Stenographer is a capture engine, not an analysis platform, and you'll need separate tools to make sense of the pcap output.
