Acalvio ShadowPlex Cloud Security vs Portlurker: 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. Portlurker 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 constrained infrastructure or lab environments who need a lightweight honeypot for early warning of reconnaissance will appreciate Portlurker's minimal footprint and protocol-agnostic listening. Written in Rust, it consumes virtually no CPU or memory overhead while still capturing connection attempts and guessing service types; the SQLite logging keeps data local and queryable without external dependencies. Skip this if you need centralized alerting, correlation with other sensors, or anything beyond passive observation of what's touching your ports.
