Both are disassemblers with decompilers. Both are used professionally. The differences that actually matter when you are choosing your first one are narrower than the internet suggests.
The short answer
Learn Ghidra first. It is free, its decompiler is genuinely good, and every concept you learn transfers. Pick up IDA later if a job requires it.
Cost
This is the decisive factor for most people learning on their own.
| Ghidra | IDA | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, open source | Free tier is limited; the professional licence is expensive |
| Decompiler | Included for all supported architectures | A paid add-on per architecture |
IDA's free version has historically restricted architectures and commercial use. Ghidra's decompiler covers everything it disassembles, at no cost.
Decompiler quality
IDA's Hex-Rays decompiler still produces somewhat cleaner output on gnarly optimised C++, and it is faster on very large binaries. Ghidra's decompiler has closed most of that gap and is more than sufficient for the malware you will actually analyse — which is usually far smaller and less optimised than a commercial application.
Scripting and automation
- Ghidra — Java and Python (Jython), with a headless analyser that is excellent for batch-processing many samples.
- IDA — IDAPython, with a large ecosystem of community plugins.
Both are scriptable. IDA's plugin ecosystem is larger and older; Ghidra's headless mode is easier to wire into a pipeline.
The part nobody mentions
The skill you are actually building is reading disassembly and reasoning about control flow. That skill is tool-independent. Someone fluent in Ghidra becomes productive in IDA in a week, and vice versa. Choosing "wrong" costs you very little.
Recommendation
Start with Ghidra because the price is zero and the decompiler is included. Learn IDA when an employer hands you a licence, or when you hit a specific limitation you can name. Do not spend your first month comparing tools instead of reading code.