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I knew people were leaning hard into Ghidra because it was free but are you implying that it’s surpassed IDA in terms of functionality?
by heyoni 4y ago
I knew people were leaning hard into Ghidra because it was free but are you implying that it’s surpassed IDA in terms of functionality?
- jhart99 4y agoOne way in which Ghidra excells is that it comes with a TON of processor definitions. IDA charges extra for those and the quality of the Ghidra definitions tends to be higher IMO. It makes Ghidra a better tool for embedded processors.
- mgk123 4y agoAlso, Ghidra's decompiler works with many CPU architectures whereas IDA only supports a few.
- rolenthedeep 4y agoNah, I don't actually have a use for firmware decompilation. I've used ghidra once just to poke around, but that's it. My understanding is that IDA does some things a lot better, but at a significant cost. Ghidra has become the de-facto tool for hackers and makers simply because it's free.
- astrange 4y agoNot only a significant cost, but they're not even very happy about you trying to buy it, because you might leak it.
- Atlas22 4y agoHave used both professionally (but mostly IDA). Its definitely not surpassed IDA in every category yet but it gets closer every update. I think IDA still wins in at least: disassembler quality of the popular instruction sets (e.g., some knowledge of undocumented instructions, sometimes control flow inference trips up where IDA's doesn't), function signature detection, decompiler (marginally), plugins available, UX polish (but I have much more experience in IDA than Ghidra so that might just be me). I think Ghidra wins for architecture availability, scripting API design & documentation, extensibility, and speed of improvement. Probably many more categories im not thinking of but if Ghidra were to match exceed IDA in the above that would likely convince me to switch over.