Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Tango: 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. Tango 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 with limited budgets who want to deploy honeypots without custom engineering will find Tango's Splunk integration valuable; the free pricing and pre-built scripts eliminate the usual barrier to deception tactics. At 255 GitHub stars and backed by functional Splunk apps, Tango makes detection-focused honeypot deployments genuinely accessible to teams of 20-100. Skip this if your organization needs response automation or threat intelligence feeds tied to honeypot activity; Tango is detection infrastructure, not a complete deception platform.
