Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Ensnare: 2026 Comparison
Acalvio ShadowPlex is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Acalvio Technologies. Ensnare 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 engineering teams running Rails applications will find immediate value in Ensnare because it deploys deception directly into your web stack without requiring separate infrastructure. At 68 GitHub stars with a free model, it's lightweight enough to test in staging within hours, which matters when you're resource-constrained. The tradeoff is real: this is a detection and disruption layer, not a forensics engine, so teams that need detailed post-incident analysis or NIST Respond capabilities should pair it with separate logging infrastructure.
