Magnet Forensics vs M.E.A.T. - Mobile Evidence Acquisition Toolkit: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

M.E.A.T. - Mobile Evidence Acquisition Toolkit

Forensic investigators and incident responders who need to pull evidence from iOS devices without waiting for paid tool licenses should start with M.E.A.T.; it handles both logical and filesystem acquisitions, which covers the two acquisition types that matter most in iOS investigations. The free pricing and 160 GitHub stars signal it's actually maintained and trusted by practitioners doing this work in the field. Skip this if you need Windows or Android support, or if your workflow depends on GUI-driven acquisition rather than command-line operations.