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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Babyshark – Wireshark made easy (terminal UI for PCAPs)

Hey all, I built babyshark, a terminal UI for PCAPs aimed at people who find Wireshark powerful but overwhelming. The goal is “PCAPs for humans”: Overview dashboard answers what’s happening + what to click next Domains view (hostnames first) → select a domain → jump straight to relevant flows (works even when DNS is encrypted/cached by using observed IPs from flows) Weird stuff view surfaces common failure/latency signals (retransmits/out-of-order hints, resets, handshake issues, DNS failures when visible) From there you can drill down: Flows → Packets → Explain (plain-English…

Babyshark is a terminal-based interface for analyzing network packet captures (PCAPs), designed for users who find Wireshark complex. It offers an overview dashboard, domains view for hostname-based navigation, and a… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Hi everyone, I recently published a small open-source project. It’s a minimal network packet analyzer written in Go — designed more like a learning toy than a replacement for Wireshark. It currently supports parsing basic protocols like TLS, DNS, and HTTP, and includes a tiny fuzzing engine to test payload responses. You can inspect raw packet content directly from the terminal. The output is colored for readability, and the code structure is kept simple and clear. The entire program is very small — just about 400 lines of Go code. I know it’s not anywhere near Wireshark’s level, and I still…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2WA

    2012 · cloudshark.org · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hi HN community, I’m Zach, founder and CEO of Warp, and am excited to show you Warp, a fast Rust-based terminal that’s easy to use and built for teams. As of today, Warp is in public beta and any Mac user can download it. It works with bash, zsh, and fish. The terminal’s teletype-like interface has made it hard for the CLI to thrive. After 20 years of programming, I still find it hard to copy a command’s output; I always forget how to use `tar`; and I always have to relearn how to move my cursor. To fix fundamental accessibility issues, I believe we need to start innovating on the terminal,…

    2022 · warp.dev · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hi all, I'm excited to announce Stratoshark, a sibling application to Wireshark that lets you capture and analyze process activity (system calls) and log messages in the same way that Wireshark lets you capture and analyze network packets. If you would like to try it out you can download installers for Windows and macOS and source code for all platforms at https://stratoshark.org. AMA: I'm the goofball whose name is at the top of the "About" box in both applications, and I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have.

    2025 · stratoshark.org · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hey HN, we built Subtrace (https://subtrace.dev) to let you see all incoming and outgoing requests in your backend server—like Wireshark, but for Docker containers. It comes with a Chrome DevTools-like interface. Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsGa6ZwVxdA, and see our docs for examples: https://docs.subtrace.dev. Subtrace lets you see every request with full payload, headers, status code, and latency details. Tools like Sentry and OpenTelemetry often leave out these crucial details, making prod debugging slow and annoying. Most of the…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    This code is still in early beta, but i sincerley hope it will become as ubiquitous as VIM on Linux.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Hey all, wanted to share my recent weekend hack project. I wanted to improve upon the existing space for looking up information about IP addresses and ASNs. The backend is written in Rust and pulls BGP data every 8 hours from the RIPE RIS project to build up a routing table and also adds geolocation information. The frontend is using React and Tailwind. Would love any feedback or suggestions on what to improve.

    2023 · ip.guide · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    WireHub is a side project I've been working on, on and off, for close to a year now. It's made with django and minimal javascript. It's a hosted WireGuard config generator/manager, that you can invite others to join your networks and manage their own configs/devices. It's still very much a beta, maybe an mvp, but I just wanted to get some early from the community. Thanks!

    2023 · wirehub.org · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hi HN — I’m the developer of NetViews, a macOS utility I built because I wanted better visibility into what was actually happening on my wired and wireless networks. I live in the CLI, but for discovery and ongoing monitoring, I kept bouncing between tools, terminals, and mental context switches. I wanted something faster and more visual, without losing technical depth — so I built a GUI that brings my favorite diagnostics together in one place. About three months ago, I shared an early version here and got a ton of great feedback. I listened: a new name (it was PingStalker), a longer trial,…

    Feb 2026 · netviews.app · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    A few months ago, I benchmarked FastAPI on an i9 MacBook Pro. I couldn't believe my eyes. A primary REST endpoint to `sum` two integers took 6 milliseconds to evaluate. It is okay if you are targeting a server in another city, but it should be less when your client and server apps are running on the same machine. FastAPI would have bottleneck-ed the inference of our lightweight UForm neural networks recently trending on HN under the title "Beating OpenAI CLIP with 100x less data and compute". (Thank you all for the kind words!) So I wrote another library. It has been a while since I have…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11
  12. 12

    Hey HN! We've developed OpenAPI AutoSpec, a tool for automatically generating OpenAPI specifications from localhost network traffic. It’s designed to simplify the creation of API documentation by just using your website or service, especially useful when you're pressed for time. Documenting endpoints one by one sucks. This project originated from us needing it at our past jobs when building 3rd-party integrations. It acts as a local server proxy that listens to your application’s HTTP traffic and automatically translates this into OpenAPI 3.0 specs, documenting endpoints, requests, and…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    HTTP client/libcurl TUI front end in Rust, with request + key storage - PThorpe92/CuTE

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    qsa.sh ▲107

    External security scan of your own IP, in your terminal

    Jul 2026 · qsa.sh · its alternatives →

  15. 15LS
  16. 16

    I'm launching Wirewiki.com today! Wirewiki makes the internet’s hidden infrastructure browsable. I quit my job 5 years ago to scale Nslookup.io. But after reaching 600k monthly users, I hit a ceiling. I couldn't naturally expand beyond DNS because of the domain name. So I went back to the drawing board: how would I make it today? Not as a collection of tools, but as a browsable graph. I've spent hundreds of hours and commits building that. It's not even at 10% of what I want it to be, but more than enough to be useful, and (in my biased opinion) much better than what's out there. Wirewiki…

    Feb 2026 · wirewiki.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Wireshark for MCP. A transparent proxy that shows every real tool call between your AI client and your MCP servers, live in your terminal. - kerlenton/mcpsnoop

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18NM

    A real-time network connection monitoring tool built with Rust and GTK4, displaying active connections with live I/O statistics in a modern graphical interface. https://github.com/grigio/network-monitor

    Nov 2025 · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hey all, Just wanted to show off this app I built, its a LAN based WebRTC baby monitor that connects any apple devices together over WIFI so you can turn an old iPad or iPhone into a baby monitor! I got a bit sick of all the sketchy products that require you to buy another device and may or may not connect to Chinese servers and store all your information somewhere. So I figured what if there were no servers and we could just use our existing devices! I would love any feedback! You will need two apple devices to test it, but simulators do work.

    2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    a webcam that can be run on a bare terminal. Contribute to mustafaakin/terminal-webcam development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hi HN - I’m the developer of PingStalker, a macOS utility I built to see what’s really happening on the LAN/WLAN. I live in the CLI, but when it came to discovery and monitoring, I found it limiting. So I built a GUI that brings my favorite tools together in one place. PingStalker started because I wanted to know if something on the network was scanning my machine. I also wanted quick access to core details—external IP, Wi-Fi data, and local topology. Then I wanted more: fast, reliable scans using ARP tables and ICMP. As a Wi-Fi engineer, I couldn’t stop there. I kept adding ways to…

    Nov 2025 · pingstalker.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    User space WireGuard port-forward in Rust. Contribute to aramperes/onetun development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Wireshark-style terminal packet analyzer on eBPF/TCX — live packet list, protocol detail tree, section-colorized hex; works on raw-IP tunnel devices - yeet-src/pktscope

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24TY

    Hi HN, Some misbehaving networks drop WireGuard packets either by accident or on purpose. Commonly the latter is done with simple DPI rules that block the handshake initiation [1], but it could be applied to other message types as well. We thought it would be great if there was tool for folks to use as a quick litmus test to see if this happening for them, without having to configure a client to send data through a random, functional WireGuard tunnel to an untrusted remote host. So we built probe.sh. How it works: - The probe.sh web app is an Elixir Phoenix app that spawns a few gen_udp…

    2024 · probe.sh · its alternatives →

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