Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Capsicum: 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. Capsicum 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.
Infrastructure teams running multi-tenant or high-risk workloads will get the most from Capsicum because its capability-based isolation model prevents privilege escalation attacks that traditional OS-level sandboxing leaves open. The framework's kernel-enforced process boundaries mean a compromised application cannot exploit its way to adjacent processes or system resources, which matters when you're running untrusted code or legacy software you can't modify. Not the right fit if you need user-facing threat detection or incident response features; Capsicum is isolation infrastructure, not a monitoring tool.
