Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Malbait: 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. Malbait 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 low-resource infrastructure or lab environments should deploy Malbait to observe attacker behavior without operational overhead; it's a lightweight Perl honeypot that costs nothing and runs anywhere legacy systems already exist. The 9 GitHub stars reflect its niche maturity, and frankly, that's appropriate for a tool designed to waste time rather than stop threats. Skip this if you're hunting for centralized threat intelligence feeds or automated response; Malbait is pure observation and engagement, nothing more.
