Actifile Digital Forensics vs libevt: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Actifile Digital Forensics is a commercial digital forensics and incident response tool by Actifile. libevt is a free digital forensics and incident response tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best digital forensics and incident response 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:
SMB and mid-market teams without dedicated forensics staff will get immediate value from Actifile Digital Forensics because real-time anomaly detection catches insider threats and data exfiltration before they scale. The tool's zero-maintenance cloud deployment and 24/7 automated monitoring mean you get continuous visibility without hiring forensics analysts. Skip this if you need post-incident recovery and reconstruction as your primary function; Actifile prioritizes detection over deep forensic analysis, so enterprises building IR capabilities around evidence preservation and timeline reconstruction should look elsewhere.
Forensic investigators and incident response teams building custom parsing pipelines will extract value from libevt because it handles legacy Windows EVT files that commercial tools often skip. The library's 60 GitHub stars and active maintenance signal it's relied upon by practitioners who need programmatic access to pre-Vista event logs rather than waiting for vendor support. Skip this if your team needs a GUI tool or expects built-in correlation and alerting; libevt is a foundation for developers, not an end-user platform.
