Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Wireshark VS Apify

Compare Wireshark VS Apify and see what are their differences

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Wireshark logo 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.

Apify logo Apify

Apify is a web scraping and automation platform that can turn any website into an API.
  • Wireshark Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-11
  • Apify Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-30

Apify is a JavaScript & Node.js based data extraction tool for websites that crawls lists of URLs and automates workflows on the web. With Apify you can manage and automatically scale a pool of headless Chrome / Puppeteer instances, maintain queues of URLs to crawl, store crawling results locally or in the cloud, rotate proxies and much more.

Wireshark features and specs

  • Comprehensive Protocol Support
    Wireshark supports a vast number of protocols out of the box, allowing for detailed inspection and analysis of network traffic.
  • Free and Open-Source
    Wireshark is free to use and its source code is openly available, enabling customization and community-driven improvements.
  • Cross-Platform Compatibility
    Wireshark runs on various operating systems including Windows, macOS, and Linux, making it accessible to a wide audience.
  • Rich Feature Set
    It offers features like live capture, offline analysis, deep inspection of hundreds of protocols, and powerful display filters for granular traffic analysis.
  • Strong Community Support
    A large and active community provides extensive documentation, tutorials, and support forums, making it easier for users to troubleshoot and learn.

Possible disadvantages of Wireshark

  • Steep Learning Curve
    Due to its extensive feature set and technical nature, Wireshark can be challenging for beginners to master.
  • Resource Intensive
    Live traffic capture and analysis can consume considerable system resources, which may affect performance, especially on less powerful machines.
  • Security Risks
    Running packet capture tools like Wireshark on production systems carries inherent security risks, as it could potentially expose sensitive data.
  • Interface Complexity
    The user interface, while powerful, can be overwhelming and non-intuitive for new users, making navigation and finding specific features difficult.
  • Limited Support for Encrypted Traffic
    Wireshark has limited capabilities when it comes to analyzing encrypted traffic, as decryption support requires additional setup and access to encryption keys.

Apify features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Apify provides a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for users of all technical levels to create and manage web scraping tasks.
  • Scalability
    Apify is built to handle tasks of various sizes, from small-scale projects to enterprise-level operations, making it a scalable solution.
  • Integration and API Support
    It offers extensive API support, allowing for seamless integration with other tools and systems to enhance automated workflows.
  • Customizability
    Users can customize their scraping bots (actors) with different settings and scripts to fit specific needs and requirements.
  • Cloud-based
    Being a cloud-based platform, Apify allows users to run their scraping tasks without needing local resources, which is convenient and efficient.
  • Comprehensive Documentation
    Apify provides thorough documentation and tutorials, which help users get started quickly and solve issues efficiently.
  • Community and Support
    Apify has an active community and solid customer support to assist users with their needs and enhance their overall experience.

Possible disadvantages of Apify

  • Learning Curve
    While the interface is user-friendly, there may still be a learning curve for those new to web scraping and automation.
  • Cost
    Apify can be expensive compared to other web scraping tools, particularly for extensive use cases that require high volumes of data.
  • Dependency on External Factors
    Web scraping often depends on the stability of the target websites. Changes in website structures can break scripts, requiring ongoing maintenance.
  • Performance Limitations
    The performance of cloud-based scraping tasks can be affected by network latency and other external factors beyond user control.
  • Potential Legal Issues
    Web scraping can raise legal concerns, particularly when scraping data from websites that restrict such activities in their terms of service.
  • Resource Intensity
    Complex scraping tasks can be resource-intensive, potentially requiring higher-tier subscriptions and more computing resources, driving up costs.

Analysis of Wireshark

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Wireshark is considered an excellent tool for network analysis. Its open-source nature, regular updates, and strong community support further enhance its reputation as a reliable and robust tool.

Why this product is good

  • Wireshark is widely regarded as a leading network protocol analyzer due to its comprehensive features, user-friendly interface, and extensive protocol support. It allows users to capture and examine data packets in real-time, making it invaluable for diagnosing network issues, performing security audits, and educational purposes.

Recommended for

  • Network administrators looking to troubleshoot connectivity issues.
  • Security professionals conducting penetration tests and analyzing network traffic for vulnerabilities.
  • Students and educators who need a practical tool to learn about network protocols and behaviors.
  • IT professionals managing complex networks who require detailed traffic analysis.

Analysis of Apify

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Apify is considered a good choice for web scraping and automation needs due to its comprehensive features, user-friendly interface, and strong community support. It is especially beneficial for those who require efficient, large-scale data extraction and workflow automation.

Why this product is good

  • Apify is an established platform known for its robust web scraping and automation capabilities. It provides a powerful API, pre-built actors for common tasks, and allows you to create custom web scrapers with ease. The platform is scalable, supports a variety of programming languages, and offers features like scheduling, proxies, and data storage solutions. This versatility makes it a valuable tool for businesses and developers needing efficient data retrieval and workflow automation.

Recommended for

  • Developers looking for a versatile web scraping solution.
  • Businesses needing to automate data collection processes.
  • Researchers and analysts requiring extensive data from the web.
  • Marketers seeking competitive analysis through data scraping.
  • Tech enthusiasts interested in exploring web automation tools.

Wireshark videos

Wireshark Tutorial for Beginners

More videos:

  • Review - Monitor Network Traffic with Wireshark - Review
  • Review - Wireshark 101: CloudShark Review - HakTip 144

Apify videos

Apify product news - 2019/01/30

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Wireshark and Apify)
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Web Scraping
0 0%
100% 100
Log Management
100 100%
0% 0
Data Extraction
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

Wireshark Reviews

9 Best Angry IP Scanner Alternatives Reviewed 2021 (Free & Paid)
The beauty in Wireshark is that your network scans can be as broad or as granular as you make them. With a few clicks, you can begin capturing a snapshot of all packet traffic across your local area network. It can be overwhelming at first to see every single packet across a network, but Wireshark makes isolating specific events simple with its color coding and filtering...
10 Best WireShark Alternatives for Android Devices in 2021
If you are well enough into network communication, you must know about WireShark. WireShark is the most popular network analyzer for PC. You can use WireShark to see anything on your network that’s not encrypted. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have an Android app, however, you can still track, monitor, or capture network packets on your Android devices using our best list of...
Source: techreen.com
11 Best Wireshark Alternatives in 2020
Wireshark is a widely used network monitoring and WiFi troubleshooting tool. However, with Wireshark tool is that you can only gather information from the network but cannot send this information.
Source: www.guru99.com
5 Best Wireshark alternative packet sniffers
Wireshark & Alternative tools FAQs ⭐Can Wireshark do deep packet inspection or do I need something else?⭐Is Wireshark a vulnerability scanner?⭐Is Wireshark good at port scanning?⭐Which tool is a command line alternative to Wireshark?
Comparing Charles Proxy, Fiddler, Wireshark, and Requestly
Although thousands of developers around the globe use Wireshark and Charles Proxy, they fail to occupy the top side in the design aspect. Wireshark’s interface is robust and detailed but can be intimidating for beginners. While Charles Proxy has a more approachable interface compared to Wireshark, it might seem cluttered to some users. Fiddler’s UI is information-rich and...
Source: dev.to

Apify Reviews

Top 15 Best TinyTask Alternatives in 2022
This is another tinytask alternative. For you to link various web services and APIs, Apify has provided many web integration options. You can add data processing and customised computation processes in addition to letting the data flow between them. With the data that is freely accessible on the web, you may provide crucial insights, and easy lead creation allows you to...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apify should be more popular than Wireshark. It has been mentiond 26 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.

Wireshark mentions (11)

  • Wifi problematic, wired connections seem okay. Help?
    Https://wireshark.org, opening that, go to edit preferences and enable "IP network" in the name resolution area, to show website names instead of only IP addresses. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Eeros in bridge mode with wired home
    To prove this, download wireshark Https://wireshark.org/. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Lose internet when downloading large files
    Give that a try and I'll re-recommend for a second time, to run and watch Wireshark: Https://wireshark.org. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Performance scores for Google Lighthouse/Insights seem to be very inaccurate
    Https://www.gap.com/ returned a performance score of 10/100, with a time to interactive score of 36.1 seconds! Https://www.patreon.com/ returned a score of 18 Https://wireshark.org/ returned a score of 28, with "unused javascript" taking 14.9 seconds to load. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Is there a way to programatically turn off Downtime on a child device?
    I tried using Wireshark to figure out which URL is being called but my knowledge here is VERY limited and I couldn’t figure it out. Source: about 3 years ago
View more

Apify mentions (26)

  • How to scrape TikTok using Python
    For deployment, we'll use the Apify platform. It's a simple and effective environment for cloud deployment, allowing efficient interaction with your crawler. Call it via API, schedule tasks, integrate with various services, and much more. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • How to scrape Bluesky with Python
    We already have a fully functional implementation for local execution. Let us explore how to adapt it for running on the Apify Platform and transform in Apify Actor. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive
    We've had the best success by first converting the HTML to a simpler format (i.e. markdown) before passing it to the LLM. There are a few ways to do this that we've tried, namely Extractus[0] and dom-to-semantic-markdown[1]. Internally we use Apify[2] and Firecrawl[3] for Magic Loops[4] that run in the cloud, both of which have options for simplifying pages built-in, but for our Chrome Extension we use... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • Current problems and mistakes of web scraping in Python and tricks to solve them!
    Developed by Apify, it is a Python adaptation of their famous JS framework crawlee, first released on Jul 9, 2019. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Show HN: Crawlee for Python – a web scraping and browser automation library
    Hey all, This is Jan, the founder of [Apify](https://apify.com/)—a full-stack web scraping platform. After the success of [Crawlee for JavaScript](https://github.com/apify/crawlee/) today! The main features are: - A unified programming interface for both HTTP (HTTPX with BeautifulSoup) & headless browser crawling (Playwright). - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Wireshark and Apify, you can also consider the following products

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

import.io - Import. io helps its users find the internet data they need, organize and store it, and transform it into a format that provides them with the context they need.

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Scrapy - Scrapy | A Fast and Powerful Scraping and Web Crawling Framework

SolarWinds NPM - Advanced network monitoring for on-premises, hybrid, and cloud. Download a FREE 30-day trial of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) today!

ParseHub - ParseHub is a free web scraping tool. With our advanced web scraper, extracting data is as easy as clicking the data you need.