Bharat FTK vs FTK Imager
Exterro (Access Data) · United States · Free (imager only) — full FTK paid, US$4,000+ / seat
FTK Imager is the industry-standard free imager but stops at acquisition — no legal copilot, no BSA §63 certificate, no UPI triage, no Indic OCR. Bharat FTK is a superset: it does the same court-defensible imaging plus 60+ modules FTK Imager never shipped, tuned for Indian law and Indian FinTech.
Capability matrix
| Capability | Bharat FTK | FTK Imager |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free (imager only) |
| Works fully offline | Yes — air-gap safe, zero telemetry | Yes |
| BSA Section 63 certificate | Yes — one-click, court-ready | No |
| BNS / BNSS / BSA legal copilot | Yes — offline RAG on full corpus | No |
| UPI / Paytm / PhonePe / GPay triage | Native, per-VPA breakdown | No |
| IPC ↔ BNS / CrPC ↔ BNSS translator | Built-in | No |
| Installer footprint | ~110 MB · single .exe · runs from USB | ~50 MB · Windows installer required |
| Data sovereignty | 100% Made in India · never leaves the machine | US vendor · data sovereignty risk if paired with cloud AccessData tools |
Migrating from FTK Imager?
Investigators who image with FTK Imager can drop the same E01 output into Bharat FTK's Analyst Lab Mode for BSA §63 certificate generation, entity extraction and legal-copilot review — no re-imaging required.
Other comparisons
Bharat FTK v3.1.0
Free. Single .exe. No install, no account. Runs on any Windows 10/11 (64-bit) machine or USB — even fully offline.
Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit) · ~110 MB · Runs from USB · No install, no account. Until we complete code-signing, Windows SmartScreen may show an "unknown publisher" prompt on first run — click More info → Run anyway.