APFS FUSE Driver for Linux vs hivex: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
APFS FUSE Driver for Linux is a free digital forensics tool. hivex is a free digital forensics tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best digital forensics fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of available product data, here is our conclusion:
Forensic examiners and incident responders working with seized Apple hardware or cloud-native Linux environments need APFS FUSE Driver for Linux because it's the only free tool that lets you mount and analyze encrypted APFS volumes without leaving the Linux command line. With nearly 2,000 GitHub stars and active maintenance, it's proven reliable enough that major forensic labs have standardized on it for macOS evidence acquisition pipelines. Skip this if your team relies on commercial forensic suites with GUI workflows; read-only FUSE mounting demands CLI competency and won't recover deleted files the way carving tools do.
Forensics teams and incident responders who need to extract and parse Windows Registry hives for timeline reconstruction should reach for hivex; its C API eliminates the friction of shelling out to binary tools and lets you script registry analysis into custom workflows. At 145 GitHub stars with active maintenance, it's lightweight enough to embed in larger forensic pipelines without dependency bloat. Skip this if you need GUI-driven registry browsing or automated anomaly detection; hivex is a library for practitioners who code, not a packaged forensics platform.
