Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Bait and Switch Honeypot: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Acalvio ShadowPlex is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Acalvio Technologies. Bait and Switch 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:
Mid-market and enterprise security teams with exposed APIs, web applications, or IoT infrastructure should use ShadowPlex to catch reconnaissance and credential attacks before they reach production systems. The platform's external-facing decoys generate high-fidelity threat intelligence in STIX format while monitoring for password spraying and brute-force attempts, directly addressing ID.RA and DE.CM in NIST CSF 2.0. Skip this if your attack surface is entirely internal or if you need deep visibility into post-breach lateral movement; ShadowPlex is optimized for early detection at the perimeter, not incident response.
Security teams running on-premise networks who need to actively flush out lateral movement will benefit most from Bait and Switch Honeypot; its aggressive deception tactics,fake credentials, decoy services, trigger-based alerts,force attackers to reveal themselves before they pivot. The free pricing means you can deploy multiple instances across subnets without budget negotiation. Skip this if your infrastructure is primarily cloud-native or if your team lacks the manual tuning required to keep false positives from overwhelming your SOC; honeypots demand active monitoring, not set-and-forget configuration.
