Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Medpot: 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. Medpot 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.
Healthcare security teams building internal detection labs or red team infrastructure will get the most from Medpot because it emulates live HL7 and FHIR protocols instead of generic network services, letting you test alerts against realistic healthcare traffic patterns without production risk. The free pricing and GitHub availability mean you can spin up multiple instances across your lab environment with zero licensing friction. Skip this if you need a managed honeypot service with dashboards and alerting baked in; Medpot is a DIY emulator that requires you to handle collection and analysis yourself.
