Scalpel, as good as it was back in its time, sadly has been stalled. Carrier and/or the folks in charge of The Sleuth Kit have taken it into their github repo[0] but there haven't been commits for ~7 years now.

I did a thesis on file carving some 10 years ago, and scalpels ideas where very good back then. Photorec[1], however, has been the gold standard for a long time on (open source) file carving. It can handle text based formats way better (scalpel is severely limited in this aspect due to the "header/footer" paradigm), and is a wonder with stream based formats (that can have boundaries on the bit level).

And it's not because they authors weren't good[2], I think what mainly happened is that they didn't have the time to keep maintaining the software they created (I know that has happened to me more than once).

There are also some commercial file carving tools, though most are aimed at having better integration with forensics software (like Encase, FTK, Oxygen, etc) or automate parts of the process, like document analysis. Still, if you just want to compare them by their ability to recover files, I'm pretty sure Photorec makes it to the top.

[0] https://github.com/sleuthkit/scalpel

[1] https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download (PhotoRec is part of TestDisk)

[2] They're some of the best in the field of digital forensics