A lot of published research relies on proprietary tools, like IDA, to generate the ground truth for the methods they implement. In addition, certain tasks, e.g. during binary analysis, might be very common, but not supported by the tool itself or with plugins only existing for proprietary tools.

Examples

• Detection of cryptographic functions in Ghidra
• Searching for common vulnerabilities (e.g. like https://github.com/KeenSecurityLab/BinAbsInspector)
• Analysis of firmware images (determine base adresses, memory maps, memory mapped I/O, etc.)