Actifile Digital Forensics vs lw-yara: 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. lw-yara 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.
Forensics teams and incident responders hunting PHP shells in compromised web applications should use lw-yara for its laser focus on webserver malware detection; the 107 GitHub stars and active maintenance show this ruleset actually gets used in post-breach investigations where generic YARA rules fall short. The free pricing means you can bake it into your DFIR playbooks without budget friction. Skip this if you need detection across the full application stack or run primarily on non-PHP infrastructure; lw-yara does one thing and won't help you find .NET backdoors or kernel rootkits.
