Packet Capture (cStor®) vs tcpxtract: 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. tcpxtract 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 and forensic analysts who need to rapidly extract files from pcap data without parsing every packet manually should reach for tcpxtract; its file signature-based extraction handles dozens of formats at scale and runs on minimal hardware. The tool's free, open-source design means you can deploy it in airgapped networks or integrate it into automated triage pipelines without licensing friction. Skip this if you need GUI-driven workflows or post-extraction file analysis; tcpxtract stops at extraction and leaves validation to your other tools.
