Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Syrup: 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. Syrup 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 exposed SSH infrastructure who want to see what attackers actually do once they breach credentials will find Syrup's session recording and fake shell interactions invaluable for threat intelligence; the Go implementation keeps deployment lightweight on commodity hardware. Its 99 GitHub stars and free pricing make it a low-friction addition to existing detection workflows, though it prioritizes observation over blocking, so pair it with network controls if you're treating SSH as a critical perimeter. Skip Syrup if you need production-grade SSH access management or NIST Respond capabilities; it's purely about understanding attacker behavior after the fact.
