Acalvio ShadowPlex vs SpamHole.net: 2026 Comparison
Acalvio ShadowPlex is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Acalvio Technologies. SpamHole.net 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 their own mail infrastructure who need to actively identify and block spammer IPs will find SpamHole.net valuable; it collects spam targeting your domain, automatically logs sender IPs, and feeds data directly into blacklists without the overhead of commercial threat intelligence services. The free pricing means you're only investing engineer time to deploy and monitor the honeypot, making it practical even for resource-constrained teams. Skip this if you're looking for enterprise-scale email filtering or expect managed threat feeds; SpamHole is a DIY tool that works best when you're willing to integrate the IP data into your own firewall or mail gateway rules.
