Stellar vs EaseUS 2026: The Free Tiers Are Not What They Look Like

The size of what you can actually recover, and the condition attached to it. EaseUS states on its own free page that the free edition recovers up to 2 GB. Stellar's free edition page states that it includes 1 GB of free recovery by default, and that sharing the product on social media unlocks an additional gigabyte to reach 2 GB. Both figures were read on the vendors' own pages on 2026-08-26. The practical consequence is that the two are only equivalent if you are willing to post about the software, and that a single 1.5 GB video file is inside EaseUS's free limit and outside Stellar's default one.

Partly, and it is the single most useful thing a free tier does. Both products scan and preview before you pay, so you can see file names and often thumbnails of what the scan found. That tells you whether the data is still reachable at all, which is the question that decides everything else. What a preview cannot tell you is whether a large file is intact end to end, because a file can be listed, previewable from its first blocks, and still truncated. Recover a small sample first and open it in its real application before buying a licence on the strength of a file list.

Check the vendor page for your exact case rather than trusting a comparison table, including this one. Both cover the mainstream Windows and macOS file systems, which is why the file system is rarely what separates them for a normal user. The differences appear at the edges: RAID sets, virtual machine disks, and encrypted volumes are handled by the higher tiers rather than the entry ones, and both vendors sell those capabilities as separate, more expensive editions. If your case is one of those, the tier matters far more than the brand.

It depends on something you can answer and we cannot: whether this is a one-off accident or a recurring need. Data recovery is usually a one-off, and an annual licence bought during an emergency quietly renews a year later on a card nobody remembers. A lifetime licence removes that, at a higher price up front. Whichever you choose, check the renewal terms at the moment of purchase rather than afterwards, because that is where the unpleasant surprises live, and both vendors change prices and packaging often enough that any figure printed in an article ages badly.

No. Run the quick scan first, because a recently deleted file whose entry is merely unlinked is usually found in minutes, and a deep scan on a large drive can run for hours. The deep scan is what you escalate to when the quick scan comes back empty or when the partition is RAW, since it reconstructs files from their signatures rather than from directory entries. That is also why deep scan results often lose the original file names: the signature is intact, the metadata that held the name is not.

Stopping writes to the affected drive. Every new file written can land on the blocks that still hold the deleted data, and once that happens no software recovers it, whichever brand is on the box. In practice this means not installing the recovery tool onto the drive you are trying to recover, and preferring to work from a copy of the disc rather than the disc itself when the data matters. The tool choice moves the odds a little; continuing to use the drive removes them entirely.