Of course, dual-tooling seems a nice and handy thing but… to be honest…knowing the limitations of these tools (and i mean all of them) you cannot "seriously validate" your data just by using multiple tools. Especially when working with smart devices (android, iOs etc.)
By all means these tools, despite beeing really good, are not "fire and forget".
Lets say you've got an android device "decoded" with XRY - it tells you that there are 4 emails on the device.
Now you and want to check which databases the tool looked at and which are missing ? Did it look at .journal oder .wal files ? did it carve in unallocated space ? Good luck analyzing that.
Or you want to browse through the file system and look for additional android-email-apps/backups etc..Looking at files in hex ? - good luck with that again - you`ll end up using external hex-viewer which is a cumbersome workflow.
Sometimes you find out that emails/chats etc. are missing because the filepaths changed after the last app-update. There is no way to guide it to that new folder…and so on.
IMHO when comparing these tools it is also very important to look at what you can do AFTER the software has finished decoding. There are some that just "present" you the data and others that make further investigation alot easier.
I will go ahead and throw my opinion out there.
First of all my firm is all retired law enforcement and so we were trained on Cellebrite from early on.
When we opened up our own shop we spent a lot of time looking at options other than Cellebrite because of the expense (both the 10K initial purchase and the 3K maintenance per year). We tried Sustein's Secureview, Paraben's Device Seizure, Oxygen, and Lantern. Eventually after being in business for about year we went ahead and purchased a Cellebrite UFED Touch Ultimate.
At the present time mobile devices are about 75% of our firms business and about 90% of our firm's charitable work (we provide a lot of free forensic work for law enforcement on child exploitation cases which is what most of us did previously).
Hands down, the UFED is the best tool in our arsenal. It cover's the widest variety of devices and is very highly respected in the legal community. The other main tool that we use for iOS devices primarily is Katana Forensic's Lantern. The attorney's who give us the work generally love the reports from these devices.
We also use the Securview, Device Seizure, and Oxygen on a case by case basis and have had good success with each on several phones. These devices, however are generally only used on those few devices where we have not liked our extractions from our primary tools.
If you are on a budget and you are seeing the overwhelming number of iOS devices that we were, Lantern is an excellent investment. The other tools are nice to have if you go with the multi-platform approach like we have chosen (we never like to return a device with no or poor results if we can help it). If you have the financial ability I would invest in a Cellebrite, they have paid for themselves many times over, and when you are stuck on an issue, their technical support makes the cost more than worth it.
Okay, I know I am late to the party but here's my input. We have used Cellebrite Touch for years and and just this year moved over to the Ufed 4 PC and love it. I can speak from personal experience (been doing phones when the greatest tool was bitpim) and found the 4PC software runs pretty good on a macbook Air 2 with a bootcamped Windows 10 installation. On a full size desktop running 32+gb of ram it runs amazingly. The search function is great and the ability to provide our investigators the ability to use the ufed reader report makes our turn around even better.
We have used Lantern for the past several years from Katana and while it was an amazing tool, it is showing its age very poorly. The tool has not been updated since March 2015 and there is no information on any upcoming updates and when I talk to the tech support, it is coming….
I went to a school this past year and was introduced to BlackBag Technologies Mobilyze and was very impressed. The amount of data it pulled and the ease by which it is used makes it now one of our go to tools. The ability to drop the mobilyze case into Blacklight only enhances the capabilities of the software. And the price point makes it easy for me to purchase several licenses for my guys. One of the big advantages is Blacklight does not lock you down when using the dongle like lots of tools do. Once you start the acquisition with the dongle in place, pull and go to the next. It will finish the process and wait on you, not like most where the removal of the dongle stops the entire process immediately. The software will also run on windows and mac.
While the tool is more or less aimed at the iOS world, it just processed an android and pulled deleted data for me. I was duly impressed with the process. It is not as fast as Cellebrite but then the price is only a fraction of the cost. I can wait a little extra time for the price.
I have tested and used Magnet Acquire and while it did a fine job on the phones it could process, it was hit and miss on makes and models. With some time it looks to be a tool which should mature nicely.