Software Alternatives & Reviews

Ostinato VS netcat

Compare Ostinato VS netcat and see what are their differences

Ostinato logo Ostinato

Ostinato is a packet crafter and traffic generator for network engineers. Wireshark in Reverse.

netcat logo netcat

Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections...
  • Ostinato Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-28

A very capable alternative to the industry standard traffic generator and network testing tools, at a fraction of the cost.

Functional testing and Performance testing. All common protocols. Create packets from scratch or import, edit and replay PCAP files. Use the friendly GUI for manual testing and the powerful API for test automation and scripting. Emulate multiple devices with ARP and ping support.

  • netcat Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-11-19

Ostinato

$ Details
$49.0 / One-off (1 user)
Platforms
Windows MacOS Linux Docker Virtual Appliance
Release Date
2010 April

netcat

Pricing URL
-
$ Details
Platforms
-
Release Date
-

Ostinato features and specs

  • Flexible Packet Crafting: Yes
  • Line Rate Traffic (Turbo add-on): Yes - 1G/10G/25G/40G
  • Automation Support: Yes - Python API
  • Multicast: Yes - Multicast Data, IGMP and MLD

netcat features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Ostinato videos

Ostinato device emulation

More videos:

  • Demo - Generate SIP traffic with Ostinato
  • Demo - Ostinato overview and Demo

netcat videos

Linux Terminal 101: Netcat

More videos:

  • Review - Advanced Netcat and TCP Fun - Hak5 1922
  • Review - Netcat 101: Remote Shells in Windows, HakTip 86

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ostinato and netcat)
Monitoring Tools
24 24%
76% 76
Security
39 39%
61% 61
Log Management
15 15%
85% 85
Security Monitoring
100 100%
0% 0

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Ostinato and netcat.

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

Ostinato's answer

From individual network engineers to small companies to Fortune 500 companies

How would you describe your primary audience?

Ostinato's answer

Ostinato is used by network engineers and developers building, testing or deploying networks and network devices

What's the story behind your product?

Ostinato's answer

Network engineer and programmer Srivats P created Ostinato as an alternative to pricey commercial traffic generators. You can read the full origin story.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

Ostinato's answer

Advanced features at a fraction of the cost of commercial traffic generators. Outstanding customer support.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

Ostinato's answer

C++, Qt5, libpcap, AF_XDP

User comments

Share your experience with using Ostinato and netcat. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Ostinato and netcat

Ostinato Reviews

  1. great stuff

    it just does the job! great support from the creator as well.

  2. Best Ethernet Traffic Generator

    As a novice to networking protocol, I was able to understand the protocols much better with the help of Ostinato Traffic generator. With wide options to explore and support to use the same thing with python helped me and my team in understanding & testing of different protocols. Especially response from Srivats for the queries helped me step custom streams for my application.

  3. Best packet generator I've ever used

    I used Ostinato a couple years back at a different company and loved it then. Now, at a new company, purchased a new license for it and am still impressed. Super user friendly and intuitive, the creator reaches out after you buy and offers awesome support/tutorial videos.

    Network engineers, this is the app to test storm control, packet rate limits, and any other feature you need to test. Also replay wireshark packet captures. So awesome.

    👍 Pros:    Replay wireshark packet captures|Packet crafting|Set packets/second rates
    👎 Cons:    None

netcat Reviews

9 Best Angry IP Scanner Alternatives Reviewed 2021 (Free & Paid)
Netcat lacks a lot of the documentation you can easily find with software like AngryIP or Nmap which in my opinion is its biggest drawback. If you’re thinking about trying out Netcat, check out our Netcat Cheat Sheet to quickly pull up powerful and useful commands. Netcat is compatible with Windows, Linux, and macOS systems.
Top 5 Best Port Scanners
Netcat is one of the oldest network tools in the "Unixverse", it's been there since 1995, and the last official version is from 2004. Although it has many forks and variants that work pretty well on modern operating systems, like ncat from the Nmap suite, or this alternative Netcat version from Mike Frysinger.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, netcat should be more popular than Ostinato. It has been mentiond 7 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Ostinato mentions (3)

netcat mentions (7)

  • could not connect to the rhel-9 from putty in windows machine
    If you don't like using telnet, that's fine. Don't use it. There are plenty of other options available. Use netcat. Or use netcat. Or use netcat. Or read and write directly to /dev/tcp/hostname/port using shell constructs. Or run openssl s_client if you suspect something complicated is listening on the other end. There is more than one way to do it and ways that are not your way still work. Source: 11 months ago
  • The HTTP crash course nobody asked for
    Reminder, there are many different netcats, here are some of the most commons: - netcat-traditional http://www.stearns.org/nc/ - netcat-openbsd : https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.bin/nc/netcat.c (also packaged in Debian) - ncat https://nmap.org/ncat/ - netcat GNU: https://netcat.sourceforge.net/ (quite rare) To prevent any confusion, I like to recommend socat: http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Gaining remote access to a computer with a reverse shell attack in Node.js
    A common tool to execute a reverse shell is called netcat. If you're using macOS, it should be installed by default. You can check by running nc -help in a terminal window. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Programm to send and receive TCP/UDP Packets
    You could try using Ncat on Windows or netcat on Linux, though it's a command-line only tool if that matters. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Is there a way to copy a file from a remote shell to local without using scp?
    If you have netcat, you can easily set up a transfer from one machine to the other:. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ostinato and netcat, you can also consider the following products

Wireshark - Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows. It lets you capture and interactively browse the traffic running on a computer network.

iperf - A TCP, UDP, and SCTP network bandwidth measurement tool

tcpdump - tcpdump is a common packet analyzer that runs under the command line.

Scapy - Scapy is a powerful interactive packet manipulation program.

socat - socat is a relay for bidirectional data transfer between two independent data channels.

packeth - packeth is GUI and CLI packet generator tool for ethernet.