Comparison · All figures checked 16 August 2026
Best web evidence tools in 2026
Six tools that turn web content into something a court will look at: Page Vault, Pagefreezer, Hunchly, TrueScreen, FAW and ProofSnap. Compared on what they publish about price, how they are licensed, what lands in your hands and who can check it afterwards.
Disclosure, before anything else
This roundup is written by ProofSnap, which is one of the six. It is not impartial and cannot be. What it can be is checkable: every competitor figure links to the page it came from with the date it was read, every tool has an explicit "not for" line including ours, and three competitors are recommended over ProofSnap for specific jobs further down. If a number here is wrong, mail support@getproofsnap.com and it gets corrected.
The short version
Which one should you buy?
Pagefreezer if a regulator can ask you for years of your own website. Page Vault if you need collections done for you with an affidavit from the vendor. FAW if you acquire at volume and need a crawler, Tor and network capture. Hunchly if you want a passive record of everything you browsed during an investigation. TrueScreen if you certify from a phone in the field or record online meetings. ProofSnap if you need one page sealed in the next two minutes, at a published price, in a package the other side can verify without installing anything.
Two of these are not really competitors: Pagefreezer solves retention and Hunchly solves investigation logging. Putting them in the same table is useful anyway, because buyers routinely arrive with the wrong category in mind.
Published pricing, side by side
Vendor pages only. Where a vendor does not publish, the cell says so rather than guessing. Currencies are left as each vendor states them.
| Tool | Entry price, as published | Licence model | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Page Vault | On Demand from $199 (websites, documents), $299 videos, $349 social profiles. Browser software: public pricing not disclosed, quote-based | Per collection, or annual contract for software | page-vault.com |
| Pagefreezer | Public pricing not disclosed, quote-based | Annual contract, scales with archive size and retention | our six-source check |
| Hunchly | Classic $109 per year, Cloud $19.99 per month | Annual, per user | hunch.ly |
| TrueScreen | Personal pay per use, per-credit price not published. Business from 99 EUR per month. Enterprise custom | Credits, plus subscription tiers | truescreen.io |
| FAW | Lite 599 EUR + VAT first year (renewal 399), Professional 1,299 EUR + VAT (renewal 599), ON-DEMAND 249 EUR + VAT for 24 hours, USB dongle 499 EUR + VAT | Annual, per workstation | fawproject.com |
| ProofSnap | $8.99, $16.99 and $28.99 per month. SnapPack from $4.99 one-time, no subscription | Per account, sign in on any machine | our own list prices |
All figures read on the vendors' own pages on 16 August 2026, except the Pagefreezer row, where the finding is the absence of a published price across six sources. Trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Capability matrix
Read the rows, not the totals. Nobody wins this table, because the six products answer different questions.
| Capability | Page Vault | Pagefreezer | Hunchly | TrueScreen | FAW | ProofSnap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Full price published | Partly | No | Yes | Partly | Yes | Yes |
| Buy and start without contacting sales | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Done-for-you collection service | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | Limited |
| Vendor affidavit, declarant deposable | Yes | Not published | No | Not published | No | No, template you sign |
| Continuous archiving for retention rules | No | Yes | No | No | Scheduled captures | No |
| Passive logging of everything you browse | No | No | Yes | No | No | No, on demand |
| Site crawler and bulk acquisition | Service side | Yes | No | Not published | Yes | No |
| Tor and dark web acquisition | Not published | Not published | Not published | Not published | Yes | No |
| Mobile capture in the field | No | No | No | Yes, iOS and Android | No | No |
| eIDAS qualified timestamp | Not published | Not published | No | Yes | Via Namirial | Yes, Enterprise |
| Public blockchain anchor | Not published | Not published | No | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Open-source verifier anyone can run | No | No | No | No | No | Yes, MIT |
| Runs on macOS and Linux | Not published | Cloud service | Yes | Yes, browser and portal | Not published | Yes |
| One-off purchase, no contract | Yes, per collection | No | Annual | Yes, credits | Yes, 24h licence | Yes, SnapPack |
"Not published" means the claim could not be found in the vendor's public documentation on 16 August 2026, not that the capability is absent. Nothing in this table is a statement about the admissibility of any vendor's output.
Best for, and not for
Every tool gets both lines, ours included.
Page Vault
Best for: United States litigation where you want the collection performed and sworn to by the vendor, with eDiscovery load files for the review platform.
Not for: tight budgets or high volume, since usage is counted by pages in the output PDF and a video counts as ten pages.
Full pricing breakdown: Page Vault pricing
Pagefreezer
Best for: regulated organisations that must retain their own website, social accounts and collaboration platforms under rules such as SEC 17a-4 and FINRA 4511, with WORM storage and a public access link for auditors.
Not for: a single urgent exhibit. The quote cycle is longer than the lifespan of the post you are trying to keep.
Full pricing check: Pagefreezer pricing
Hunchly
Best for: OSINT investigators who want everything they browsed captured automatically into a case file, at $109 a year. Nothing else here does passive logging, and for investigation work it is the right instrument.
Not for: producing a single sealed exhibit with a qualified timestamp. It is a log of what you saw, which is a different artifact from a certified copy.
Side by side: Hunchly vs ProofSnap
TrueScreen
Best for: certifying from a phone in the field with photo, video, audio and GPS, and for certified recording of online meetings on Teams, Meet, Zoom or Webex. It also holds ISO/IEC 27001 and states EU-only data processing, which some procurement requires.
Not for: buyers who need the full price up front. The per-credit price is not published and API, SDK, SSO and C2PA sit in the quote-based Enterprise tier.
Side by side: TrueScreen vs ProofSnap
FAW
Best for: professional acquirers. A crawler that walks a whole site, Tor and dark web access, network traffic capture with certificates and video pulled out of proprietary players, plus a reputation among court-appointed experts since 2013.
Not for: occasional users or cross-platform teams. The licence is per workstation, freeing it needs a 499 EUR dongle, and system requirements are not published.
Side by side: FAW vs ProofSnap
ProofSnap
Best for: one page, one session or one file sealed in the next couple of minutes at a published price, in a package that carries its own verification scripts, a Bitcoin anchor and, on Enterprise, an eIDAS qualified timestamp, so the other side can check it without installing anything.
Not for: retention programmes, bulk crawling, Tor, mobile field capture, or matters that need a vendor to sign the affidavit. It has none of those and is not going to grow them by next quarter.
Try it without an account in the section below.
Disclosure, continued
Since we are one of the six, here is ours
The other five are a desktop forensic browser, two cloud services, a passive logger and a multi-surface platform. ProofSnap is the smallest shape in the table: a side panel in the browser you already have open.
- Single page, multi-tab session or file, into a self-verifying ZIP
- Runs wherever Chrome or Edge runs, licensed per account not per workstation
- 29 interface languages, evidence PDF exportable in another one
Showing it is the point. Four of the other five cannot be seen without a demo call or a licence purchase, which is a fair thing to hold against a table that claims to compare them.
The ProofSnap side panel, English interface
Free, no signup, no email, runs in this tab
Test one of the six instead of reading about all six
Only one tool in this roundup lets you check its output before buying anything, and it seems fair to make that concrete rather than claim it.
1. Hash a file in your browser
Pick any file. SHA-256 is computed locally with the Web Crypto API and nothing is uploaded.
Computed locally. Nothing left this page.
What this proves and what it does not. A hash proves integrity, not time. The date is the other half, and that is what a timestamp adds. Every tool in the table above is, at bottom, a way of binding those two things together and writing it down.
2. Download a real evidence package
An actual output ZIP with the manifest, signature, public key and verification scripts inside.
Download the sample ZIP3. Verify it in the open verifier
Check the hashes, the signature and the blockchain anchor with source code that is public. No account.
Open the Trust VerifierBeing straight about the paid part: capturing your own pages needs a plan or a SnapPack, and the 7-day trial asks for a credit card at sign-up. The three things above genuinely do not.
Method. Prices were taken from each vendor's own pricing page and nowhere else, except where a cell explicitly says a third party reported it. Where a vendor does not publish, the table records that rather than reproducing an aggregator estimate. Capability rows say "not published" when a claim could not be found in the vendor's own documentation, which is not the same as the capability being absent.
Sources. Page Vault, Pagefreezer, Hunchly, TrueScreen, FAW. All read 16 August 2026. Hunchly was acquired by Maltego in May 2025 and licences remain annual and per user.
Corrections and legal note. This is comparative advertising naming competitors, lawful in the EU under Directive 2006/114/EC when it is objective, verifiable and not denigrating. We make no claim about the admissibility of any vendor's output, we date every figure, and we correct within a week of being told something has changed.
Last checked: 16 August 2026.
Still deciding? Start with the cheapest reversible step.
Seal the page now for a few dollars, then buy the bigger tool when the case tells you which one you needed. That order is almost never wrong.
The 7-day trial requires a credit card at sign-up and can be cancelled at any time.