Acalvio ShadowPlex Cloud Security vs SMTP Honeypot: 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. SMTP Honeypot 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 mail infrastructure who want to see what attackers are actually probing for will get fast intelligence from SMTP Honeypot's configurable responses and automatic extraction of reconnaissance attempts. The free pricing and minimal setup overhead mean you can spin it up in an afternoon on a non-production network segment to feed your threat intel program. Skip this if you need centralized management across multiple honeypot types or expect vendor support; this is a single-purpose tool best suited to teams comfortable running open-source infrastructure.
