Acalvio ShadowPlex Cloud Security vs ESPot: 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. 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 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 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.
