Acalvio ShadowPlex Cloud Security vs DemonHunter: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Acalvio ShadowPlex Cloud Security is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Acalvio Technologies. DemonHunter 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 Cloud Security
Enterprise and mid-market teams managing multi-cloud infrastructure should adopt ShadowPlex Cloud Security if detecting lateral movement and privilege escalation in cloud identities is your weakest detection layer. Agentless deployment via native cloud APIs means you're live in AWS, Azure, and GCP without touching workloads, and the honeytoken approach catches attackers during reconnaissance when they're still gathering credentials rather than after breach. This tool prioritizes detection and intent capture over response automation, so it's less valuable for teams already confident in their cloud identity monitoring or those expecting the platform to enforce remediation workflows.
Security teams deploying honeypots as early warning for reconnaissance and lateral movement will find DemonHunter's distributed agent architecture useful for scaling deception across multiple network segments without heavy infrastructure. The Agent/Master design lets you run lightweight sensors on constrained systems while centralizing logs, and the free pricing removes budget friction for teams experimenting with deception before committing to commercial platforms. Skip this if you need out-of-the-box dashboards or managed threat hunting; DemonHunter requires hands-on tuning of protocol handlers and assumes comfort with self-hosted infrastructure.
