Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Troje: 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. Troje 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 experimenting with active defense or running small-to-medium detection labs will find Troje valuable for honeypot deployment without licensing friction; the free model and LXC container foundation mean you can spin up deceptive environments quickly and capture attacker behavior at scale. The dynamic container approach gives you flexibility that static honeypots lack, letting you adapt bait and monitoring rules between deployments. Skip this if you need integration with your existing SIEM or require managed threat feeds; Troje is a focused detection tool, not an orchestration platform, and the 45 GitHub stars suggest limited community momentum for production hardening.
