How Stairwell Differs from VirusTotal

Stairwell and VirusTotal are both used by security teams to analyze files and detect threats, but they serve fundamentally different purposes. VirusTotal is a public threat-intelligence lookup service; Stairwell is a private file-analysis platform deployed inside your environment. Many teams use both together.

What VirusTotal Does

VirusTotal aggregates results from 70+ antivirus engines and provides a quick reputation check for any file, URL, or hash. It is the industry standard for answering "Has this file been seen before, and do any engines flag it?" Results are shared with the VirusTotal community, making it a powerful crowd-sourced intelligence resource.

What Stairwell Does

Stairwell continuously inventories every file across your endpoints via a lightweight forwarder, stores them in a private cloud vault, and applies AI-driven analysis, YARA rules, and AV scanning against your entire file history. It is designed to answer "What is in my environment right now, what was there before, and is any of it malicious?" Your data is never shared publicly.

Key Differences

Dimension	VirusTotal	Stairwell
Data Privacy	Public -- uploaded files and results are shared with the community	Private -- files stay in your organization's vault and are never exposed
Analysis Type	Multi-engine signature scanning (70+ AV engines)	ML/behavioral analysis, AV scanning, and continuous YARA evaluation
Historical Coverage	Point-in-time lookups; limited to what has been submitted	Full environment history -- every file ever seen on every asset, queryable retroactively
Variant Discovery	Not available	Automatic variant detection surfaces files that are structurally similar to known threats
YARA Capabilities	Available with VT Enterprise (Livehunt/Retrohunt)	Unlimited live and retroactive YARA rules included, evaluated against your entire corpus
API Access	Yes (quota-based tiers)	Yes (unlimited lookups against your private data)
Deployment Model	Cloud-based lookup service -- you submit hashes or files	Forwarder agent on endpoints + cloud platform -- files are collected automatically

When to Use Each

Use VirusTotal when you need a fast reputation check on an unknown file or hash, or when you want to see which AV engines detect a sample across the broader threat landscape.

Use Stairwell when you need to know whether a threat (or its variants) exists anywhere in your environment today or existed in the past, when you require private analysis that does not expose your files, or when you want retroactive detection -- the ability to apply new intelligence against your full file history.

Use both together by checking VirusTotal for community intelligence during triage, then pivoting to Stairwell to determine internal exposure, discover variants, and track the threat across assets over time.