# Ghidra

80 Hacker News commenters recommended Ghidra and 20 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free, open-source reverse engineering suite that decompiles many processor architectures and can be automated; critics find the UI laggy and hard for newcomers to learn.

## Why people recommend it

- Works well with LLM and MCP workflows (11 comments): ""ghidra -> ask LLM to reason about ghidra decompilation" is very effective on all but the most highly obfuscated binaries." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47786331)) "I would also suggest spending a few minutes to set up an mCP server with ghidra once you've learned the basics" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040402)) "It's been pretty good with a Ghidra MCP at signature scanning for extremely niche undocumented software." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48344337))
- Extensible with plugins, scripts and APIs (4 comments): "Ghidra has a cli mode and various bindings so you can automate decompiling various binaries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46252888)) "Ghidra's architecture lends itself to really powerful automation tricks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036218)) "Ghidra is extremely extensible with their plugin/tool architecture" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036212))
- Decompiles many processor architectures (3 comments): "Ghidra excels because it is extremely abstract, so new processors can be added at will and automatically have a decompiler" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035979)) "Ghidra (which supports a lot of those old CPU arches) for more advanced analysis" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036794)) "Ghidra is the better tool if you're dealing with exotic architectures" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036089))
- Used for serious professional work (3 comments): "I recommend it for serious work. Well, serious enough that I got paid for doing it, and/or given talks about it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036245)) "Ghidra is a very impressive piece of software with a deep bench of functionality." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47035346)) "once you get into embedded Ghidra is heavily used for serious work" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47036295))

## What people warn about

- Slow, laggy UI and performance (3 comments): "Ghidra's most painful limitation was extremely slow time with Go Lang" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112155)) "The Ghidra UI is noticeably laggy to perform basic operations even with tiny binaries" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043385)) "I'm not super happy with the design (I feel like it's built to be slow…)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47700522))
- Poor results on some binaries (3 comments): "These results are terrible, false positives and false negatives. Useless" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112548)) "At this point static analysis like IDA and Ghidra stopped working." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50042973)) "attempting to shoehorn them into ghidra produces not great results" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155830))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [GhidraMCP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ghidra-mcp.md): 30 recommend
- [IDA Pro](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ida-pro.md): 25 recommend
- [REA Reverse-Engineer Anything](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rea-reverse-engineer-anything.md): 14 recommend
- [Binary Ninja](https://hackerapproved.com/p/binary-ninja.md): 13 recommend
- [Kampala](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kampala.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Ghidra", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ghidra/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).