Arkime vs Suricata
GitHub Stats
About Arkime
Arkime (formerly Moloch) is an open-source, large-scale, full packet capturing, indexing, and database system. It stores and indexes network traffic in standard PCAP format, providing fast, indexed access to historical network sessions through a powerful web interface. Arkime's viewer lets analysts search, filter, and drill into network sessions by IP, port, protocol, country, ASN, header content, and dozens of other fields. It integrates with Elasticsearch for session metadata storage and supports PCAP export for deeper analysis in Wireshark or Zeek. Arkime is designed to scale to multi-gigabit capture rates across distributed sensors, making it suitable for enterprise and ISP-scale deployments. Its SPIGraph feature provides visual timeline analysis, and the Hunt feature allows searching through full packet payloads. Arkime is commonly deployed alongside Zeek and Suricata for a complete network security monitoring stack.
About Suricata
Suricata is a high-performance Network IDS, IPS, and Network Security Monitoring engine developed by the Open Information Security Foundation (OISF). It inspects network traffic using rules (compatible with Snort rules) and protocol analysis to detect threats including intrusion attempts, malware communication, policy violations, and data exfiltration. Suricata's multi-threaded architecture takes full advantage of modern multi-core hardware, achieving inspection speeds that single-threaded alternatives cannot match. Beyond IDS/IPS alerting, Suricata provides comprehensive protocol logging (HTTP, DNS, TLS, SMB, and more), file extraction from network traffic, and Lua scripting for custom detection logic. It supports AF_PACKET, PF_RING, and DPDK for high-speed packet acquisition, and outputs structured JSON logs (EVE format) that integrate cleanly with Elasticsearch, Splunk, and other SIEM platforms.
Platform Support
Tags
Arkime only
Suricata only