Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Honeycomb: 2026 Comparison
Acalvio ShadowPlex is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Acalvio Technologies. Honeycomb 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 custom IDS signatures at scale will get the most from Honeycomb because it eliminates the manual work of honeypot analysis and signature writing through automation. The free pricing removes budget friction for mid-market shops piloting deception-based detection before committing to expensive managed services. Skip this if your team lacks network monitoring infrastructure to deploy honeypots or if you need vendor-maintained signatures; Honeycomb requires hands-on tuning to avoid false positives in noisy environments.
