Acalvio ShadowPlex vs DDoSPot: 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. DDoSPot 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.
Teams running DNS or NTP services exposed to the internet should deploy DDoSPot to map UDP-based DDoS attack patterns without slowing production traffic; the plugin architecture means you drop it in alongside existing stacks. The daily blacklist output feeds directly into your firewall ruleset, turning honeypot data into actionable blocks within 24 hours. Skip this if you need L3/L4 volumetric attack mitigation on your perimeter; DDoSPot is detection and intelligence only, not a scrubbing center replacement.
