Software Alternatives & Reviews

netcat VS tcpdump

Compare netcat VS tcpdump and see what are their differences

netcat

Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections...

tcpdump

tcpdump is a common packet analyzer that runs under the command line.
  • netcat Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-11-19
  • tcpdump Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-27

netcat

Categories
  • Monitoring Tools
  • Log Management
  • Productivity
  • Security
Website netcat.sourceforge.net  
Details $-

tcpdump

Categories
  • Monitoring Tools
  • Log Management
  • Productivity
  • Security
Website tcpdump.org  
Details $

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

tcpdump videos

Tcpdump - Protocol Review 5 (TCP)

More videos:

  • Review - Tcpdump - Protocol Review 3 (UDP)
  • Review - Tcpdump - Protocol Review 4 (DNS) - Draft

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to netcat and tcpdump)
Monitoring Tools
51 51%
49% 49
Log Management
47 47%
53% 53
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0
Security
38 38%
62% 62

User comments

Share your experience with using netcat and tcpdump. 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 netcat and tcpdump

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.

tcpdump Reviews

6 Best Wireshark Alternatives for Windows and macOS
The quickness that you can have with tcpdump over Wireshark is awesome. It is one of those tools that many network administrators prefer whenever they need to take a look at the actual network packets that are being transmitted. The Tcpdump is not as feature rich as Wireshark but the output of its packet dump can be used as input by other programs. Moreover, It can be used...
Source: techwiser.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, netcat seems to be more popular. 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.

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: 9 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 / over 1 year 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: almost 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

tcpdump mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of tcpdump yet. Tracking of tcpdump recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing netcat and tcpdump, 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.

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

Ettercap - Ettercap is a suite for man in the middle attacks on LAN.

SmartSniff - SmartSniff is a packet sniffer that capture TCP/IP packets and display them as sequence of conversations between clients and servers.

NetworkMiner - NetworkMiner is a Network Forensic Analysis Tool (NFAT) for Windows.

Simple Port Forwarding - Simple Port Forwarding works with WebPages and not directly with your router.