Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Acalvio ShadowPlex is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Acalvio Technologies. Beelzebub 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.
Based on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, integrations, company size fit, 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 building threat intelligence pipelines or validating detection logic will get the most from Beelzebub because it's free and runs on Kubernetes, letting you deploy realistic attack scenarios without licensing friction. The 1,899 GitHub stars and native Helm support signal active maintenance and actual ops use, not academic-only code. Skip this if you need a managed honeypot service with SOC integration out of the box; Beelzebub requires hands-on deployment and tuning to extract signal from its deception data.
Deception platform using external-facing decoys for threat intel & recon detection
Open-source LLM-powered deception framework for multi-protocol honeypot services.
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Common questions about comparing Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Beelzebub for your honeypots & deception needs.
Acalvio ShadowPlex: Deception platform using external-facing decoys for threat intel & recon detection. built by Acalvio Technologies. Core capabilities include External-facing decoys for web apps, APIs, and IPv6 IIoT services, Reconnaissance detection and early attack visibility, Credential abuse monitoring (password spraying, brute-force, credential stuffing)..
Beelzebub: Open-source LLM-powered deception framework for multi-protocol honeypot services. Core capabilities include LLM-powered adaptive deception engine generating real-time contextual responses, Multi-protocol decoy services: SSH, HTTP, TCP, TELNET, and MCP, YAML-based low-code service configuration with regex command matching..
Both serve the Honeypots & Deception market but differ in approach, feature depth, and target audience.
Acalvio ShadowPlex differentiates with External-facing decoys for web apps, APIs, and IPv6 IIoT services, Reconnaissance detection and early attack visibility, Credential abuse monitoring (password spraying, brute-force, credential stuffing). Beelzebub differentiates with LLM-powered adaptive deception engine generating real-time contextual responses, Multi-protocol decoy services: SSH, HTTP, TCP, TELNET, and MCP, YAML-based low-code service configuration with regex command matching.
Acalvio ShadowPlex is developed by Acalvio Technologies. Beelzebub is open-source with 1,899 GitHub stars. Vendor maturity, funding stage, and team size can be important factors when evaluating long-term viability and support quality.
Acalvio ShadowPlex and Beelzebub serve similar Honeypots & Deception use cases: both are Honeypots & Deception tools. Key differences: Acalvio ShadowPlex is Commercial while Beelzebub is Free, Beelzebub is open-source. Review the feature comparison above to determine which fits your requirements.
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