IDA Pro
No written verdict yet. Here is what commenters said.
8recommend
2warn against
Jan 9, 2026first mention
Oct 11, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“A lot of data shows IDA Pro is significantly better than Ghidra”
Show 3 more
“non-AI tooling (IDA Pro, Ghidra) that's good at binary reverse engineering”
“IDA Pro 5 (Freeware) is the last Freeware version able to handle DOS executeables”
Caveats and dissent
“IDA's C++ API is really easy to misuse and corrupt a DB”
“IDA, had UXes that were very difficult for new users to pick up”
Show 1 more
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Ghidra by NSA 5 mentions
- Kuna: Decompiler Development in the Age of Coding Agents 2 mentions
- Command and Conquer Generals natively ported to macOS, iPhone, iPad using Fable 2 mentions
- 500B tokens later: Letting AI agents decompile a first-person shooter 1 mention
- Porting my 1993 Amiga game to Godot, with an LLM reading the 68000 assembly 1 mention
- How much of HN is AI? 1 mention
Also written as IDA. Data: ida-pro.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 23
“At this point static analysis like IDA and Ghidra stopped working.”
“Use an ancient free IDA-Pro for disassembly”
“https://github.com/HexRaysSA/ida-nexus”
Also a few free-but-cut-down versions like 5 (which still recognizes MS-DOS executables). I'm not going to recommend downloading it from any of the locations mentioned here but it's out there: https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/19179/older-versions-of-ida-free
“agent renaming all functions, globals in the IDA DB”
“Hook it up to IDA”
“A lot of data shows IDA Pro is significantly better than Ghidra”
“copying disassembly from the current function and all nested called functions from IDA”
“even IDApro has perpetual license.”
“IDA's C++ API is really easy to misuse and corrupt a DB”
“I have a custom IDA Python-based CLI”
“IDA Pro has this functionality built in, you can export a .idc script file”
“non-AI tooling (IDA Pro, Ghidra) that's good at binary reverse engineering”
“IDA Pro 5 (Freeware) is the last Freeware version able to handle DOS executeables”
“IDA, had UXes that were very difficult for new users to pick up”
“Yep, it's cheaper than IDA and I like the UI better.”
Also this. https://github.com/jart/blink
“I've used IDA, Ghidra, and Binary Ninja a lot over the years”
“It's not worth the price for hobbyists.”
“the tools you use IDA, Ghidra that turn the assembly code back into C pseudo code”
“IDA is heavily scriptable so the LLM usually ends up interacting rather interesting ways”
“They are as good as it gets when it comes to not choking on unusual binaries”
“is absolutely enough for the accountable and fun work in our teams”