Absolute Rehydrate vs AppLocker Guidance: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Absolute Rehydrate is a commercial endpoint protection platform tool by Absolute. AppLocker Guidance is a free endpoint protection platform tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best endpoint protection platform fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Enterprise and mid-market security teams dealing with ransomware or destructive malware need Absolute Rehydrate because it recovers thousands of endpoints to a known-good state in hours, not days, regardless of whether they're on or off network. The firmware-embedded recovery mechanism works even when the OS is compromised, and NIST RC.RP coverage validates the restoration actually happened. Skip this if your incident response strategy relies on selective file restoration or if you lack the operational discipline to maintain certified golden images; Absolute Rehydrate is built for organizations that can treat full device reimaging as their primary recovery path.
Windows security teams with mature change control processes will extract real value from AppLocker Guidance because it removes the guesswork from NSA-aligned whitelisting rules that actually work in production. The 232 GitHub stars reflect real deployments; these aren't theoretical configs but scripts tested by practitioners who've dealt with the false-positive hell of poorly tuned policies. Skip this if your organization needs centralized policy management across heterogeneous endpoints or lacks the Windows infrastructure depth to troubleshoot AppLocker's DACL limitations yourself.
