go-yara vs dnYara: 2026 Comparison
go-yara is a free digital forensics and incident response tool. dnYara 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:
Incident response teams and forensics analysts who need to hunt malware signatures across disk images, memory dumps, and live systems will find go-yara valuable for its speed and portability; the Go implementation compiles to native binaries that run on any platform without runtime dependencies, which matters when you're working across Windows, Linux, and macOS infrastructure. With 387 GitHub stars and active maintenance, it's battle-tested enough for production hunts, though you're getting a language binding rather than a complete investigation platform. Skip this if your team needs a GUI-driven forensics suite or expects pre-built detection rules; go-yara is for practitioners who write their own YARA signatures and integrate them into custom automation.
.Net developers and forensics teams building custom detection pipelines will find dnYara essential because it's the only maintained wrapper that lets you call Yara rules natively from C# without shell escaping or process spawning. The 39 GitHub stars and active maintenance reflect a tool optimized for integration speed rather than standalone scanning. Skip this if you need a turnkey forensics platform with UI and reporting; dnYara is code-first and demands you own the orchestration layer.
