Acalvio ShadowPlex Advanced Threat Defense vs cowrie2neo: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Acalvio ShadowPlex Advanced Threat Defense is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Acalvio Technologies. cowrie2neo is a free honeypots & deception tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best honeypots & deception fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Acalvio ShadowPlex Advanced Threat Defense
Mid-market and enterprise security teams with hybrid infrastructure will get the most from ShadowPlex Advanced Threat Defense because it catches lateral movement and reconnaissance that perimeter tools miss, using AI-powered deception assets across on-premises, cloud, and OT environments simultaneously. The platform's 350+ prebuilt deception assets and agentless deployment mean you're detecting APT behavior within days, not months of tuning. Skip this if your team lacks the SOC maturity to act on high-fidelity alerts or if you're looking for a tool that also handles incident response and recovery; ShadowPlex prioritizes early detection over post-breach containment.
Security teams running Cowrie honeypots who need to hunt for attack patterns across interactions will find value in cowrie2neo's graph database approach, which reveals connection chains that flat log analysis obscures. The tool is free and lightweight enough to deploy alongside existing Cowrie instances without infrastructure overhead. Skip this if your team lacks Neo4j expertise or runs honeypots purely for alerting; the setup and query work required means this is best suited to analysts who treat honeypot data as a research asset, not just a detection feed.
