plast vs Stairwell Variant Discovery: 2026 Comparison
plast 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:
Security teams building custom threat hunting workflows on a budget will find value in plast's modular framework, which lets you assemble detection logic without vendor lock-in or licensing friction. The free, open-source model and active GitHub presence mean you're not betting on a startup's survival timeline. Skip this if your team lacks Python fluency or needs a polished UI; plast rewards hands-on operators who want to script detection rules, not click-through dashboards.
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.
