Packet Capture (cStor®) vs SkypeFreak: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros and cons, compared head to head.
Packet Capture (cStor®) is a commercial digital forensics tool by cPacket Networks. SkypeFreak 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. Independent and vendor-neutral: we never sell rankings.
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.
Incident responders investigating employee communications on Skype will find SkypeFreak saves weeks of manual artifact parsing; it automates extraction of call logs, contact lists, and message histories from Skype database files that would otherwise require hex editing or commercial forensic suites. The tool is free and openly developed on GitHub with 65 stars, lowering the barrier for smaller teams or budget-constrained shops to perform Skype-specific triage. Skip this if your investigations span multiple messaging platforms or require GUI-based case management; SkypeFreak is a single-purpose extraction framework, not a unified forensic workbench.
