Comparison of WinHex License Types and Related Products

	License type/program
Features	WinHex Eval.	WinHex Personal	WinHex Prof.	WinHex Specialist	WinHex Lab Ed.	X-Ways Imager	X-Ways Inv. CTR	X-Ways Investigator	X-Ways Forensics
Usage in business & organizations permitted	^		✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Write disk sectors, edit RAM, save large files		✓	✓	✓	✓				✓*
Hexadecimal editor	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓				✓*
Simultaneously displayable character sets	1	1	2	3	4		3	3	5
WinHex Scripts			✓	✓	✓				✓*
Specialist menu				(✓)	(✓)		(✓)	(✓)	✓
Highlighting of slack space and free space				✓	✓		(✓)	(✓)	✓
Internal definition of time zones				✓	✓		✓	✓	✓
Fast hashing algorithms				✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Multiple threads for logical searches and RVS							3	3	24
Availability of a 64-bit edition			✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
Internal RAID 0/5/5EE/6 reconstruction				✓	✓	✓			✓
Windows dynamic disks, LVM2, Apple partitioning				✓	✓	✓		✓	✓
Understands FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, TFAT, NTFS	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓			✓	✓
Understands exFAT, Ext2/3/4, CDFS, UDF				✓	✓			✓	✓
APFS, Btrfs, QNX, XFS, HFS, HFS+/HFSJ/HFSX, ReiserFS, Reiser4, UFS					✓			✓	✓
Improved recovery of deleted files in FAT32				✓	✓			✓	✓
Ability to decrypt BitLocker volumes					✓			(✓)	✓
XPRESS WofCompressed files, incompressible files with active deduplication in Windows Server					✓			✓	✓
Manual ZLIB, LZFSE, and ZSTD compression and decompression; manual NTFS, XPRESS, and LZVN decompression					✓				✓
Availability and limitation of the Recover/Copy command	file size: 200 KB	path length: 259	path length: 259	path length: 259	path length: 511	n/a	n/a	n/a	path length: 1023
Ability to parse memory dumps of various older Windows versions									✓
Disk imaging (raw/dd) and disk cloning		✓	✓	✓	✓	✓			✓
Ability to create skeleton and cleansed images									✓
Creation of evidence file containers					✓		✓	✓	✓
Ability to open and interpret evidence file containers	(✓)°	(✓)°	(✓)°	✓	✓		✓	✓	✓
Disk image interpretation (raw/DD, VMDK, VHD, VDI)				✓	✓	(✓)²		✓	✓
Creation of .e01 images/evidence files						✓			✓
Interpretation for .e01/.ex01 images/evidence files						(✓)²	(✓)	✓	✓
Mount file systems as a drive letters	°	°	°	°	✓				✓
Detection and deactivation of HPAs and DCOs					✓	✓			✓
Regular X-Tensions					✓¹				✓
Disk I/O X-Tensions					(✓)†		✓	✓	✓
Viewer X-Tensions							✓	✓	✓
Image I/O API					✓			✓	✓
Separate modes for disk/partition/volume and a file selected therein					✓		✓	✓	✓
Viewer component, gallery, preview mode							✓	✓	✓
Internal picture viewing library							✓	✓	✓
Support for file archives (zip, 7z, rar, gz, ...) and SquashFS file systems							(✓)	✓	✓
Registry hive viewer and registry report output									✓
Cases, case reports, multi-user collaboration							✓	✓	✓
Advanced keyword search and search hit lists							✓	✓	✓
Populating an event list / chronological time line									✓
Tagging, categorizing and commenting on files							✓	✓	✓
More columns and options in the directory browser				(✓)	(✓)		✓	✓	✓
Using hash databases								✓	✓
Creating hash databases									✓
H U N D R E D S  of additional features							(✓)	(✓)	✓
other functions (examples, old page)	(✓)	✓	✓	✓	✓				✓

^ only for evaluation purposes or to review evidence file containers containing no more than 1000 objects
° only evidence file containers
* if you run X-Ways Forensics as WinHex
† you need to create a case first and add the disk/image, but you cannot save and re-open that case
¹ XWF_GetRasterImage, PDF conversion, and OCR functionality not usable, and maybe more, refer to API documentation
² useful just to see partitions and to copy sectors of an image back to a storage device

Personal licenses for WinHex are available at a reduced price for non-commercial purposes only, in a non-business, non-institutional, and non-government environment. Professional licenses for WinHex allow usage of the software in any environment (at home, in a company, in an organization, or in public administration).

Upgrade Chart

You can upgrade existing perpetual licenses of certain types to a superior license type. Offers for that are usually available when you query your license status. The following types of upgrades are generally possible:

From → To	WinHex prof.	Investi- gator	Forensics (perpetual)
WinHex personal	✓		✓
WinHex professional			✓
WinHex specialist (perpetual)			✓
Investigator CTR		✓	✓
Investigator			✓
Imager (perpetual)			✓