Acalvio ShadowPlex Cloud Security vs Kippo: 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. Kippo 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 building deception infrastructure on a shoestring budget should deploy Kippo for SSH threat research and attacker behavior logging; its 1,712 GitHub stars reflect stable, field-tested code that runs on minimal hardware. The fake filesystem and session capture give you genuine attack telemetry without the operational overhead of commercial honeypots. Skip this if you need multi-protocol coverage or automated threat intelligence feeds; Kippo is SSH-only and requires you to roll your own alerting and response workflows.
