Acalvio ShadowPlex Advanced Threat Defense vs ESPot: 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. ESPot 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 legacy Elasticsearch infrastructure will find ESPot's narrow focus valuable; it exists to catch CVE-2014-3120 exploitation attempts with minimal overhead, and the daemon option means you can run it passively without touching production configs. The 28 GitHub stars and free price point reflect what this actually is: a specialized trap for a specific, aging vulnerability rather than a general-purpose honeypot framework. Skip this if you need flexibility across multiple Elasticsearch versions or CVE families; ESPot is a single-purpose tool that solves one problem well.
