Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Honeyku: 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. Honeyku 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 lean deception programs on public cloud will find Honeyku useful for fast honeypot deployment without managing infrastructure; the free tier and Heroku integration mean you can spin up fake endpoints in minutes rather than weeks of procurement and architecture work. The 65 GitHub stars and active open-source maintenance suggest the project has actual operational users validating the approach. Skip this if your threat model requires honeypots integrated with a SIEM or incident response platform; Honeyku is detection-focused and leaves alerting and triage to you.
