Acalvio ShadowPlex vs DemonHunter: 2026 Comparison
Acalvio ShadowPlex is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Acalvio Technologies. DemonHunter 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 deploying honeypots as early warning for reconnaissance and lateral movement will find DemonHunter's distributed agent architecture useful for scaling deception across multiple network segments without heavy infrastructure. The Agent/Master design lets you run lightweight sensors on constrained systems while centralizing logs, and the free pricing removes budget friction for teams experimenting with deception before committing to commercial platforms. Skip this if you need out-of-the-box dashboards or managed threat hunting; DemonHunter requires hands-on tuning of protocol handlers and assumes comfort with self-hosted infrastructure.
