Acalvio ShadowPlex vs SHIVA Spampot: 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. SHIVA Spampot 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 mail gateways or building threat intelligence feeds will find immediate value in SHIVA Spampot because it captures live spam samples without the overhead of commercial honeypot platforms, then analyzes them for IOCs and patterns you can act on immediately. The free, open-source model with 138 GitHub stars means you control the data and can deploy it in air-gapped or highly regulated environments where vendor-hosted solutions create friction. Skip this if you need polished dashboards, automated alert routing to your SIEM, or vendor support; SHIVA requires hands-on tuning and assumes you have time to parse its output yourself.
