InQuest YARA Rules vs Stairwell Variant Discovery: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
InQuest YARA Rules is a free threat hunting tool. Stairwell Variant Discovery is a commercial threat hunting tool by Stairwell. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best threat hunting fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, integrations, company size fit, here is our conclusion:
Threat hunters and malware researchers operating on tight budgets will extract real value from InQuest YARA Rules because the ruleset is actively maintained by practitioners who contribute back to the repository regularly. With 388 GitHub stars and consistent updates, you're getting rules validated against real-world samples rather than theoretical threats. Skip this if your team lacks in-house YARA expertise or needs vendor support; these rules require hands-on tuning and integration work to produce signal instead of noise.
Mid-market and enterprise threat hunters who need to move beyond hash-based detection will find real value in Stairwell Variant Discovery's structural analysis engine, which expands a single malware indicator into full family visibility without requiring YARA authoring. The tool's retroactive reanalysis across your entire historical file corpus means you can surface dormant variants the moment new threat intelligence arrives, directly strengthening your DE.AE and RS.AN capabilities. Skip this if your team lacks the analyst bandwidth to operationalize variant intelligence or if you need to pivot quickly to containment and eradication; Stairwell prioritizes discovery and forensics over automated response workflows.
