Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Honey Ports: 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. Honey Ports 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 flat networks or lab environments who want to detect reconnaissance activity will find value in Honey Ports for its simplicity; Docker-based deployment means you're monitoring in minutes without infrastructure overhead. The free pricing and minimal dependencies make it practical for resource-constrained teams to stand up basic port-scan detection across internal segments. This isn't a fit for organizations needing sophisticated threat intelligence correlation, behavioral analysis, or integration with broader deception platforms; Honey Ports does one thing narrowly and well.
