Belkasoft X Forensic vs Volatility 3

Belkasoft X Forensic acquires, analyzes, and reports digital evidence from computers, mobile devices, RAM, cars, drones, and cloud sources. Its acquisition options include DD/E01 imaging, iOS checkm8 and agent-based acquisition, and several Android methods. Analysis features include timeline and connection graph views, SQLite recovery, hash-set analysis, file carving, and picture and video analysis. The software can examine UFED and GrayKey images, virtual machines, Amazon S3-based images, Berla car exports, and data from services including Google Drive, iCloud, Microsoft 365, WhatsApp, and Telegram. Reports can be produced in formats such as HTML, XML, CSV, PDF, Excel, Word, ProjectVIC JSON, and Relativity Short Message Format. Colleagues can view shared findings with the free Evidence Reader, whether or not X Forensic is installed. The product is self-hosted and offered to government customers only. Its license is perpetual, with optional annual software maintenance and support; pricing is provided by quote. A 30-day trial requires internet access. Trial reports contain half of randomly selected artifacts, and several acquisition, decryption, virtual-machine, and command-line automation features are excluded. The company describes it as suited to digital forensic laboratories at federal and state-level law-enforcement agencies.

Volatility 3 is a free, open-source framework for extracting digital artifacts from volatile memory (RAM) samples. It gives investigators visibility into a system's runtime state and focuses on memory forensics rather than disk imaging or mobile forensics. It supports memory images from Windows, macOS, and Linux, and offers CSV, JSON, JSONL, pretty, and quick export formats.

Volatility 3 requires Python 3.8.0 or later and is published on PyPI. Windows symbols can be queried, downloaded, generated, and cached when missing; Mac and Linux symbol tables must be produced manually. A 2024 release added support for Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage. Documentation is generated from doc strings with Sphinx and available online. Bug reports go to GitHub Issues, while community questions can be taken to Slack. The license permits free use, sharing, and building, but requires public source sharing for additions made available to others. It provides the software as is, without warranty or condition to the extent allowed by law.