It doers not come packaged with a scanner. Changing cables is no big deal. Your still tuning the same tables. HPTuners does some of the calculations for you where as LS1-edit does not. There are lot's of Excel spreadsheets floating around that will do what HPTuners has packaged. Again it's all about understanding the tables and parameters. I'm not dogging HPTuners at all. It does what it's supposed to. As does LS1 edit which was the first tuning software available for the LS1. The top tuners use this software as well as the fledgeling HPTuners and EFILive. The top tuners learned on LS1 edit. LS1 edit software is $450 for single PCM vs HPTuners $650 and around 14 or 15 thousand for unlimited PCM's for all models. It's not as expensive as HPTuners but nor is it free. LS1 Edit is bare bones no bling tuning software. Neither software tunes the PCM for you. It's the expertise of the tuner and the data that person enters that determines the state of the tune. Both read and modify the same exact tables in the PCM.