ssm-acquire vs Diffy (DEPRECATED): 2026 Comparison
ssm-acquire is a free digital forensics and incident response tool. Diffy (DEPRECATED) is a free digital forensics and incident response tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best digital forensics and incident response fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of available product data, here is our conclusion:
Security teams running incident response on AWS Linux instances will get real value from ssm-acquire because it eliminates the need to build custom orchestration logic for remote forensic collection through SSM Session Manager. The tool is free and maintained on GitHub with active contributions, which matters when you're standardizing on Python-based IR workflows that need to stay current with AWS API changes. Skip this if your forensic workflow requires Windows acquisition, cross-cloud support, or a packaged UI; ssm-acquire is deliberately a Python module for teams comfortable building automation around it.
AWS incident responders investigating active compromises across multiple EC2 instances should know about Diffy; it surfaces behavioral anomalies and file differences that manual comparison misses, collapsing hours of forensic work into minutes. Netflix open-sourced the tool with 631 GitHub stars and zero licensing friction, meaning you can deploy it immediately without vendor negotiations. Stop here if your incidents span on-premises systems or non-AWS cloud providers, since Diffy was purpose-built for AWS instance forensics and lacks the portability you'd need.
