Acalvio ShadowPlex vs DNS Honeypot - UDPot: 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. DNS Honeypot - UDPot 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 with limited budgets who need to detect DNS reconnaissance in their network perimeter will find UDPot's simplicity and Docker deployability hard to beat; SQLite logging and straightforward configuration mean you're catching malicious queries within hours, not weeks. The 51 GitHub stars and free pricing reflect a tool that works best as a tactical addition to existing monitoring rather than a replacement for full DNS security infrastructure. Skip this if your organization needs centralized management across multiple honeypots or advanced threat intelligence feeds; UDPot is deliberately lightweight and single-purpose.
