Red Hand Analyzer vs Stenographer: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Red Hand Analyzer is a free digital forensics and incident response tool by Red Hand. Stenographer 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 NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Startups with limited security staff should pick Red Hand Analyzer to triage network incidents without hiring a forensics analyst; the free cloud deployment means zero infrastructure cost and immediate access to automated PCAP behavioral analysis. The tool covers both DE.CM continuous monitoring and DE.AE incident characterization, letting small teams spot compromises and understand them without manual packet inspection. Skip this if you need integration with your existing SIEM or EDR; Red Hand works best as a standalone tool for incident response, not as a detection layer feeding into your broader security stack.
Security teams doing incident response and threat hunting need Stenographer for one reason: it captures full packets at line rate without dropping traffic, which means you actually have the forensic record when you need it. A 1,800-star GitHub project with active use in production environments shows it handles sustained high-volume capture on modest hardware. Skip this if your team expects a GUI, query language, or built-in analytics; Stenographer is a capture engine, not an analysis platform, and you'll need separate tools to make sense of the pcap output.
