Acalvio ShadowPlex vs ESPot: 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. ESPot 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 running legacy Elasticsearch infrastructure will find ESPot's narrow focus valuable; it exists to catch CVE-2014-3120 exploitation attempts with minimal overhead, and the daemon option means you can run it passively without touching production configs. The 28 GitHub stars and free price point reflect what this actually is: a specialized trap for a specific, aging vulnerability rather than a general-purpose honeypot framework. Skip this if you need flexibility across multiple Elasticsearch versions or CVE families; ESPot is a single-purpose tool that solves one problem well.
