Acalvio ShadowPlex vs DionaeaFR: 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. DionaeaFR 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.
Small security teams and researchers who need a honeypot for network reconnaissance will find DionaeaFR's simplicity valuable; Dionaea's low-interaction design means you get threat intelligence without the overhead of a full production server. The 68 GitHub stars and active maintenance reflect real adoption among practitioners who value straightforward deployment over feature bloat. Skip this if you need high-interaction deception or centralized management across dozens of honeypots; DionaeaFR is a single-node tool built for labs and small networks, not enterprise-scale deception infrastructure.
