Frida vs Vivisect
Frida
frida.reVivisect
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Frida | Vivisect |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Reverse Engineering Tools | 8.7 (#4) | 7.6 (#35) |
| Collaboration | Luma syncs sessions, REPL transcripts, instruments, captures, notebook entries, and presence in real time, and uses GitHub authentication. | Users can share workspaces between Vivisect instances or run a VivServer to share a directory of workspace files over a network or localhost. |
| GUI | Luma is presented as the official Frida app with persistent sessions, a live REPL, an integrated frida-trace handler editor and real-time collaboration. | Installing the `gui` extra adds the PyQt5 dependencies needed to run the Vivisect UI. |
| Installation | CLI installation requires a recent Python 3.x release and Windows, macOS or GNU/Linux; the documented command is pip install frida-tools. | The documentation says Vivisect supports Python 3.6 and up and can be installed with pip. |
| Support | Frida’s contact page lists a Telegram group and the #frida IRC channel for contacting the community. | The project directs users to its GitHub issue tracker and the #vivisect room in Synapse Slack for bugs and issues. |
Plans
In their own words
Frida
Frida is a dynamic instrumentation toolkit for developers, reverse-engineers, and security researchers. It lets users place scripts in running processes to hook functions, inspect APIs, and trace application code without source code. Documented uses include API tracing, diagnostics, encrypted-protocol analysis, and black-box testing.
Frida supports injected, embedded, and preloaded instrumentation. When injection is unavailable, Frida Gadget can be embedded in a program, including on jailed iOS and Android systems. Supported targets include Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, Android, FreeBSD, and QNX. Language bindings include Node.js, Python, Swift, .NET, Qt/Qml, and Go, alongside a C API. The CLI tools require Python and run on Windows, macOS, or GNU/Linux; the documented installation command is `pip install frida-tools`.
Vivisect
Vivisect is a free, Apache-2.0 static analysis platform for binaries, with the related Vdb tool providing cross-platform debugging. Its pure-Python tools perform static and dynamic analysis, including built-in static and symbolic analysis, in a hybrid workflow. Analysis can run through an extensible UI, scripts, an API, or headlessly; command-line bulk processing can save a .viv workspace. Distributed analysis is available through cobra. Vivisect runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and lists i386, amd64, ARMv7, Thumb16, Thumb, AArch64, MSP430, and H8 architectures. Python 3.6 and newer are supported and installation is available through pip. The gui extra adds PyQt5 dependencies. Workspaces can be shared between instances or served over a network or localhost, with connected updates propagating as events arrive. Vdb can attach by process ID or command-line substring, or start and attach to a process.