Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Dockerpot: 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. Dockerpot 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 building internal deception infrastructure on constrained budgets should start with Dockerpot; it removes the friction of honeypot setup through Docker automation and clear configuration docs, letting smaller teams deploy faster than hand-rolled solutions. With 152 GitHub stars and free pricing, it's built for practitioners who want to test detection pipelines and validate alerting without infrastructure overhead. Skip this if you need managed honeypot services with threat intelligence feeds or multi-cloud orchestration; Dockerpot is deliberately lightweight and self-service.
