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How many people use Wireshark?

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I'm preparing a presentation on the subject of deep packet analysis. I'd like to use the number of Wireshark users as an illustration of the popularity of the tool. The only information I can find is the following from a press release regarding the takeover of CACE on the Riverbed website:

In addition to developing network analysis solutions, CACE is the sponsor of the award-winning Wireshark and WinPcap open source tools, the world’s most widely used tools for network traffic capture and analysis. The Wireshark community has millions of users and more than 400,000 downloads a month.

Are there any other figures available?

Thanks and regards...Paul

asked 20 Sep '15, 23:32

PaulOfford's gravatar image

PaulOfford
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accept rate: 11%

There used to be a great video on a world map showing how much developers worked on Wireshark from it's infancy until recent, showing how much of an open source tool it is, but i can't find it yet ..

(21 Sep '15, 00:04) Marc

One Answer:

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The latest number of monthly downloads I got from Gerald Combs (Wireshark creator) back in February 2015 was above 1 million.

answered 21 Sep '15, 04:38

Pascal%20Quantin's gravatar image

Pascal Quantin
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accept rate: 30%

don't we have more accurate numbers of users (not just downloads) from the auto-update attempts in the latest releases?

(21 Sep '15, 04:46) Kurt Knochner ♦

We'll need to wait for Gerald to comment as I do not have this number either. That said auto updater only concerns Windows users and given the releases used by people asking questions on this site, we can still see a lot of obsolete versions still being used. I"m not sure we can easily figure out the number of active users.

(21 Sep '15, 04:59) Pascal Quantin

I"m not sure we can easily figure out the number of active users.

I agree, because I myself downloaded Wireshark at least a hundred times or more, so download times won't tell us anything about the real number of users.

(21 Sep '15, 05:08) Kurt Knochner ♦