Rapid7 Labs Repository vs Stairwell Variant Discovery: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Rapid7 Labs Repository 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 detection pipelines on a budget should start with Rapid7 Labs Repository; the curated Sigma and Yara rules are battle-tested against real malware samples, not theoretical attack chains. With 80 GitHub stars and free distribution, you get immediate IOC coverage without licensing overhead or vendor lock-in. Skip this if your team lacks the engineering bandwidth to integrate and customize rule sets, or if you need pre-built detection workflows that work out of the box; this is a foundation to build on, not a finished detection platform.
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.
