[markus_zhang]

Does anyone know whether it is possible to purchase a legacy license (and don't expect any update once they move to subscription model) for IDA right now? I'm preparing to get into reverse engineering but haven't looked into IDA because I'm still sharpening up my C, assembly and Operating System skills.

Actually, for a hobbyist, maybe the Home edition is good enough? It does have Pytho scripting capacity, local debugger (I guess I can just use Windbg for windows) and decompiler (although it's cloud based so I'm not sure what does it mean).

Edit just checked the quote for IDA Pro and it's some 5000+ USD, it's a bit heavy for me.

[roblabla]

Honestly, as a hobyist, I'd really recommend looking into Ghidra. It's really great, can be modified to suit your needs much more easily both thanks to its open source nature but also because of its really good API (IDA's scripting API is a huge mess...). Its decompiler is also really really good, and keeps getting better.

This is coming from someone who has access to an IDA Pro license through work, and uses both it and Ghidra daily. IDA does a few things better than Ghidra (Lumina is much better than ghidra's FIDB, the debugger support is a bit more feature-complete), but it's certainly not worth the steep price IMO.

[markus_zhang]

Thanks. Guess I'm going to try out Ghidra later. It probably has way more than what I need.

[CoastalCoder]

I'm not really familiar with the relative merits of the different tools, but:

If you're just getting into this area, perhaps it makes sense to gain expertise with a tool that is likely to be around for a while (e.g. Ghidra) rather than one with a now-uncertain future?

[markus_zhang]

Thanks, concerning the popularity of Ghidra yeah will try it out.