MobSF is excellent open-source software. But hosting it, scaling it, patching it and integrating it with the rest of your stack is its own job. Droidwatch ships the same APK analysis depth as a managed multi-tenant platform — with billing, collaboration, threat intel and a built-in Frida dynamic sandbox.
Honest comparison. We use MobSF too — and we'll tell you when self-hosting it is the right call.
| Capability | MobSF (self-hosted) | Droidwatch |
|---|---|---|
| Static APK analysis (manifest, permissions, certs) | ✓ | ✓ |
| DEX bytecode + JADX decompilation | ✓ | ✓ Bytecode on every plan; decompilation from Pro |
| Dynamic analysis with Frida | Manual setup, BYO emulator | Built-in (runs on your own device) |
| MITRE ATT&CK Mobile mapping | Partial | ✓ Per-finding |
| OWASP MASVS / MASTG coverage report | Manual mapping | ✓ Automated |
| Multi-tenant + RBAC + invitations | No | ✓ |
| Billing / per-seat plans | No | ✓ |
| STIX 2.1 export for SIEM/SOAR | No | ✓ |
| Threat-feed enrichment (URLhaus, AbuseIPDB, OTX) | No | ✓ Built-in |
| Watchlist + email/Slack/webhook notifications | No | ✓ |
| Public app explorer / shareable reports | No | ✓ |
| Hosted SaaS option | No | ✓ |
| Self-host option | ✓ | No — hosted service |
| GitHub Action / CI integration | Community scripts | ✓ Composite action |
| DPA, GDPR, SOC 2 roadmap | Your responsibility | ✓ |
The MobSF engine isn't the problem. Operating it is.
No Docker juggling, no Postgres tuning, no scaling Celery workers, no patch cadence for the JADX/androguard stack. We run it; you analyze.
RBAC, organizations, per-user audit log, shareable reports with annotations, Slack/Teams/Discord webhooks. MobSF is single-tenant by design.
Frida hooks for SSL pinning bypass, accessibility abuse, SMS interception, JNI bridges and runtime DEX dumps — with anti-anti-Frida already wired up.
Findings cross-referenced against MalwareBazaar, AbuseIPDB, URLhaus and OTX — out of the box. Plus an optional public threat feed you can subscribe to.
Composite GitHub Action with policy-based build failure. Drop-in templates for GitLab, Bitrise, Jenkins, CircleCI and Azure Pipelines too.
Then MobSF is the right call, and we'll say so. Droidwatch is a hosted service — what you get instead is no infrastructure to run, plus multi-tenant, billing, an API and threat intel.
No. Droidwatch was built from scratch with its own analyzer pipeline (androguard, JADX, YARA, Frida, custom rule engine). MobSF is a reference we benchmark against and we credit them where we share design decisions. You can wire Droidwatch up to your own MobSF instance as a complementary engine if you want both.
Yes — drop your .yar files into the rules directory (or upload via API) and they run alongside our default ruleset. Custom rules per-organization are supported on the Team and Enterprise plans.
The Droidwatch REST API covers the same surface area (upload, status, report, download). The GitHub Action gives you a drop-in replacement for shell scripts that today curl MobSF.
No — Droidwatch is a hosted service: the web platform, the REST API and the CLI we distribute. If running it yourself is a hard requirement, MobSF is the honest answer and it is excellent at that.
Free forever, no credit card. Or talk to us about an Enterprise plan.