exif vs Mastiff: 2026 Comparison
exif is a free digital forensics and incident response tool. Mastiff 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 available product data, here is our conclusion:
Forensic investigators and incident responders who need to extract or strip metadata from image evidence will find exif indispensable for its speed and precision on the command line. The tool runs instantly on files of any size with zero dependencies, making it reliable in offline forensic environments where GUI tools often fail or introduce artifacts. Skip this if your team works primarily with modern smartphones or cloud-native forensics; exif handles JPEGs cleanly but doesn't touch the proprietary metadata formats that dominate mobile devices and requires manual integration into larger investigation workflows.
Forensic analysts and incident responders who need to rapidly extract indicators from unknown binaries and archives will find Mastiff's modular plugin architecture faster than manual unpacking. The framework supports 185+ file types across Windows, Linux, and mobile formats, letting analysts process bulk samples without writing custom parsers. Skip this if you need GUI-driven workflows or automated triage at scale; Mastiff is CLI-first and requires scripting chops to operationalize at enterprise velocity.
