Acalvio ShadowPlex vs bap: 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. bap 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 legacy applications or internal services that still rely on HTTP basic auth will find bap's value in its simplicity: deploy a lightweight honeypot, collect real credential attempts, and feed that signal into incident response workflows without managing infrastructure. At 54 GitHub stars with zero dependencies, it's genuinely frictionless to stand up alongside existing apps. Skip this if you're looking for sophisticated multi-stage deception or you've already migrated to modern auth; bap does one thing and punts everything else to your monitoring layer.
