Packetbeat vs WireEdit: What are the differences?

What is Packetbeat? Open Source application monitoring & packet tracing system. Packetbeat agents sniff the traffic between your application processes, parse on the fly protocols like HTTP, MySQL, Postgresql or REDIS and correlate the messages into transactions.

What is WireEdit? A Full Stack WYSIWYG Editor for Network Packets. WireEdit is a desktop WYSIWYG packet editor. It lets you easily edit captured network packets in a simple point-and-click interface.

Packetbeat and WireEdit can be categorized as "Network Monitoring" tools.

Some of the features offered by Packetbeat are:

• Packetbeat Statistics: Contains high-level views like the network topology, the application layer protocols repartition, the response times repartition, and others
• Packetbeat Search: This page enables you to do full text searches over the indexed network messages
• Packetbeat Query Analysis: This page demonstrates more advanced statistics like the top N slow SQL queries, the database throughput or the most common MySQL erro

On the other hand, WireEdit provides the following key features:

• Edit any packet at any layer from L1 to L7 with just a few mouse clicks. No hacking required. No need to look at Hex dumps.
• WireEdit knows all mandatory/optional elements of a packet, their data types, encoding, inter-dependency, position offsets, value constraints, checksums, etc.
• As you're editing WireEdit takes care of all the behind-the-scene details on the fly. No need to think about any of it.

Packetbeat is an open source tool with 7.4K GitHub stars and 2.51K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Packetbeat's open source repository on GitHub.