Colasoft Capsa vs. Progress Telerik Fiddler

Capsa is highly recommended to be used in small dense areas of a network where it makes sense to be able to run analytics off of a mirror port to gain insight into traffic trends. It is a costly product to install in branch locations, and requires a decent spec hardware to run appropriately

Incentivized

I am a senior software engineer and I have actively made fiddler a requirement for all of our engineers to have on their laptops by default. I have recommended it to all web developers that I have worked with and contractors that I have worked with as it has saved my mental stability on numerous occasions when trying to show people details of various web requests when working on integrations between different systems This is an absolutely fantastic product that I have used in a technical capacity many, many times and I will always suggest it as a tool when someone is debugging specifically but also for initial development to see how the requests are formed and for sharing responses and requests details so that others can recreate the request that you have sent through right down to the smallest detail

• Robust Application. Able to handle traffic that most businesses will throw at it.
• Easy to use. Easy to setup captures and filter down to specific traffic types.
• Relatively cheap for what it's able to accomplish.

Incentivized

• Needs options to scale to 10Gb/s networks. The cutoff for performance looks to be around 3Gb/sl
• Needs API access to trigger capturesl
• Needs Agents for remote capturesl

Incentivized

• The display could potentially become a bit more user-friendly over time, it's pretty easy to follow but for example, I always view the raw request/response information by default and this is not the default selection, being able to choose the default selection would be nice
• Clearer information and options to reduce 'noise' when viewing the requests, there are often a lot of background requests being sent on a computer, you can filter to roughly see what you want and filter out things that you don't want but there are different types of requests and I can't see how to filter between those - possibly a feature but could be made easier to use potentially
• Nothing else to put, this is a fantastic product so there isn't much else to suggest at this stage of using it and I have been using fiddler for years now in my role as a software engineer

Colasoft performs more like the traditional wireshark as opposed to other solutions that tend to focus on graphs instead of giving you the raw data. I personally prefer the raw data, and then the ability to build graphs upon this (which Capsa can do). This allows for quicker analysis and makes it easier to relate to.

Incentivized

• While the product doesn't detect malware, it has helped track down malware infected machines by using data from other applications to run filters to look for known traffic destinations for that malware. For me this is a huge ROI since malware can be the great unknown.
• Relatively cheap compared to the feature set.

Incentivized

• Overall this tool has sped up the process of integrating with new systems infinitely
• The cost of fiddler everywhere which is what we use specifically is nothing in comparison to the cost of dev time saved when debugging processes
• Being able to send information around so simply to other support teams to show them what responses we are getting along with the request detail have made communications much quicker and saves a lot of time going back and forth discussing what is being done and what the request is being sent