Acalvio ShadowPlex vs vnclowpot: 2026 Comparison
Acalvio ShadowPlex is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Acalvio Technologies. vnclowpot 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 threat intelligence or deception operations on a budget will find vnclowpot useful for baseline VNC reconnaissance logging without infrastructure overhead. The static auth challenge approach requires minimal compute, making it practical for labs or regional deployments where you need to passively catalog attacker behavior at scale. Skip this if you need interactive deception or lateral movement simulation; vnclowpot logs what hits it but won't deceive or delay an actual intrusion.
