AD Tripwires vs go-emulators: 2026 Comparison
AD Tripwires is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Horizon3.ai. go-emulators 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 engineers building internal test environments or lab setups will get the most from go-emulators because it's lightweight enough to spin up without infrastructure overhead, letting you simulate network behavior in Go without external dependencies. The project is actively maintained with 11 GitHub stars and requires only a Go compiler to deploy, making it ideal for teams that already code in Go and want to avoid vendor lock-in. Skip this if you need a production-grade honeypot with alerting, persistence analysis, or threat intelligence feeds; go-emulators is a testing primitive, not a monitoring system.
