AD Tripwires vs Dionaea: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
AD Tripwires is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Horizon3.ai. Dionaea 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.
Small security teams and researchers who need a low-friction honeypot for early-stage threat detection should start with Dionaea; its multi-protocol support (SMB, HTTP, FTP, SSH) means you can catch reconnaissance traffic across your most-attacked services without licensing friction. The 792 GitHub stars and active community forks signal it's battle-tested for Ubuntu and Debian deployments. Skip this if you need GUI management, alerting integrations, or SIEM connectors out of the box; Dionaea is a command-line tool that requires you to own the glue work between honeypot events and your downstream detection pipeline.
