Wireshark Free [top] Jun 2026

The benefits of using Wireshark include:

Originally named Ethereal (created by Gerald Combs in 1998), the tool was later renamed to Wireshark. Today, it is actively maintained by a global team of volunteers and sponsored by several tech companies, all while remaining open-source under the GNU General Public License (GPL). wireshark free

Because Wireshark is free and open-source, it thrives on community contributions. You don’t need to write C code to help: The benefits of using Wireshark include: Originally named

These are invaluable for capacity planning and bottleneck detection. You don’t need to write C code to

How does free Wireshark stack up against paid tools?

The entire installation takes less than 2 minutes and uses under 200 MB of disk space.

Wireshark can reconstruct entire Voice over IP calls. It can decode SIP and RTP streams, calculate jitter, show call flow diagrams, and even play back the audio (if codec support is available). This is a feature that many proprietary tools charge hundreds for—Wireshark gives it away.