AD Tripwires vs OWA Honeypot: 2026 Comparison
AD Tripwires is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Horizon3.ai. OWA Honeypot 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 protecting on-premises Exchange environments will get real value from OWA Honeypot because it's free and requires minimal setup to start collecting actual attacker behavior against your most-targeted asset. The 70 GitHub stars and active Flask codebase mean you're inheriting a tool others have debugged in production, not a dormant project. Skip this if you're looking for managed honeypot infrastructure or need multi-protocol deception across your entire network; OWA Honeypot is deliberately narrow and requires you to run and monitor it yourself.
