Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Kippo Detect: 2026 Comparison
Acalvio ShadowPlex is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Acalvio Technologies. Kippo Detect 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.
Penetration testers and red teamers who need to validate whether their own SSH honeypots are externally detectable will find Kippo Detect useful for that specific audit. The tool directly fingerprints Kippo instances over the network, catching a common misconfiguration that leaves honeypots exposed. Skip this if you're looking for a general-purpose honeypot detection framework or broader deception monitoring; Kippo Detect does one thing and won't tell you about Cowrie, Dionaea, or other SSH trap variants.
