Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Glastopf: 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. Glastopf 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 networks to catch reconnaissance traffic will get the most from Glastopf, because its modular vulnerability emulation lets you customize which weaknesses to advertise without running actual vulnerable code. The 597 GitHub stars and active Python codebase reflect a tool that works reliably for low-touch deployment in lab and staging environments. Skip Glastopf if you need enterprise-scale honeypot management, alerting integration, or support for non-web protocols; it's built for teams who can maintain infrastructure themselves and tolerate slower response cycles.
