Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Delilah Honeypot: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Short answer

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 lean threat detection operations will get immediate value from Delilah Honeypot for its specificity: it catches reconnaissance and exploitation attempts against Elasticsearch without the noise that generic honeypots create. The tool is free and GitHub-native, meaning you deploy it in under an hour and stay out of vendor licensing conversations entirely. Skip this if you need honeypot coverage across multiple database engines or a managed platform with alerting integration; Delilah is narrow by design, optimized for one attack surface.