AD Tripwires vs Cowralyze: 2026 Comparison
AD Tripwires is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Horizon3.ai. Cowralyze 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 that treat Active Directory as a detection problem, not just a hardening problem, should evaluate AD Tripwires. It deploys honeypot objects directly into AD to catch reconnaissance and lateral movement before it reaches production assets, and the integration with Horizon3.ai's NodeZero platform means you validate that your tripwires actually work against your real attack surface. Skip this if your team lacks the AD expertise to maintain decoy objects or if you're looking for a tool that also handles response automation; AD Tripwires is detection and alerting only.
Security teams running Cowrie honeypots who need to spot attack patterns across weeks or months of logs will find Cowralyze's command-line analytics useful where manual log review fails. The tool generates statistics and visualizations from local or remote honeypot data at no cost, making it practical for resource-constrained teams. Skip this if you need a GUI-based platform or real-time alerting; Cowralyze is built for retrospective analysis of honeypot activity, not operational dashboards.
