ocaml-yara by Elastic vs Yara Scanner: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
ocaml-yara by Elastic is a free detection engineering tool. Yara Scanner is a free detection engineering tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best detection engineering fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of available product data, here is our conclusion:
OCaml developers embedding malware detection into custom security tools should use ocaml-yara for direct access to YARA's pattern-matching engine without language boundary overhead. The bindings are maintained by Elastic and free, which matters for teams building detection pipelines that need to call YARA thousands of times per second without spawning subprocess overhead. This is a poor fit for teams expecting a polished UI or integration with third-party threat feeds; ocaml-yara is a low-level library, not a scanning platform.
Incident response teams running distributed infrastructure will find value in Yara Scanner's ability to coordinate yara rule scanning across multiple endpoints without licensing friction. The free pricing model and GitHub availability mean you can deploy it immediately without procurement cycles, which matters when you're triaging a live incident. Skip this if your team lacks engineering resources to operationalize custom rule sets; Yara Scanner assumes familiarity with rule writing and distributed system management.
