Cutter

Cutter puts a full graphical interface on top of Rizin, an open source reverse engineering framework. Written in C++ with the Qt toolkit, it is released under the GPL v3 by the Rizin organisation, which presents it as its official interface. Its GitHub repository was opened in September 2017, back when Cutter served as a graphical front end for radare2.

That changed in December 2020, when former radare2 developers and the Cutter team announced Rizin, a fork focused on stability and usability. Cutter 2.0, released on 29 March 2021, was the first version built on the new engine. The current release, 2.5.0, dates from 30 June 2026 and ships with Rizin 0.9.1.

What Cutter is for

Cutter takes Rizin’s analysis features and spreads them across panels you can arrange however you like, docked or floating. Once an executable is loaded, automatic analysis lists its functions, strings, imports and symbols. You can then browse the code as a linear disassembly or as a graph, with a mini-map to keep your bearings in long functions. A hex editor lets you modify any file, and bytes or instructions can be patched directly to test an idea.

The decompiler is one of its strong points. Through the rz-ghidra plugin, Cutter embeds Ghidra’s decompiler natively, without a Java virtual machine, and shows C-like pseudocode next to the disassembly. On top of that come a local and remote debugger, which its authors still label as beta, an emulation engine that helps study an encryption routine or a piece of malware without running it, and a Rizin console for typing commands when the interface is not enough. Scripts and plugins can be written in Python or C++. Version 2.5.0 added a preferences tab for Rizin configuration variables, a searchable shortcuts window and debuginfod support.

Cutter sits between two worlds. Its graphical navigation is similar in spirit to Ghidra’s, with a lighter interface and no Java dependency, while reusing Ghidra’s decompiler. Compared with radare2 and its iaito interface, it relies on Rizin, whose maintainers favour consistency between releases and a reorganised command line. Rizin can also recognise known library functions in stripped binaries automatically, using FLIRT signatures.

Who is it for?

Cutter suits analysts who want an open source graphical tool without the weight of a Java environment, students taking their first steps in disassembly and capture the flag players. Its four themes, theme editor and translations make it more welcoming than a purely command-line tool.

It does not replace a solid grasp of assembly and processor architecture. The debugger is still in beta, and so is saving analysis sessions as projects, which rizin.re still describes as experimental. Teams that need commercial support and a vendor-maintained decompiler will look at IDA Pro or Binary Ninja, both paid products, and those who need to instrument a running application will turn to Frida.

Download Cutter safely

Official releases are posted on the releases page of the rizinorg/cutter repository, which cutter.re also links to. For 2.5.0 you get two AppImages for x86_64 Linux, one built with Qt 6 and one with Qt 5, a disk image for Apple Silicon Macs, another for Intel Macs and a zip archive for 64-bit Windows, each weighing between 115 and 138 MB. On Linux you just make the AppImage executable, and on Windows you unzip the archive. The README also mentions package managers and a Docker image, and the documentation explains how to build from source.

Cutter is free, with no paid version and no sign-up, and Rizin comes bundled in the official packages. Copies hosted by general download portals, sometimes outdated and still based on radare2, add nothing and may have been altered. Software meant for examining suspicious files deserves to be fetched from the source, on GitHub.

Frequently asked questions