Arctic Swallow vs bap: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Arctic Swallow is a free honeypots & deception tool. bap 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 available product data, here is our conclusion:
Security teams experimenting with threat intelligence pipelines on constrained budgets will get real value from Arctic Swallow; it's free, requires minimal infrastructure to deploy, and generates actual attack data without the overhead of production honeypots. The low-interaction design means faster setup and lower false positive noise compared to full-stack deceptions, though that same simplicity means you'll miss the behavioral depth that catches sophisticated attackers. Skip this if your organization needs production-grade threat collection; Arctic Swallow is a learning tool and research project, not a replacement for commercial honeypot platforms.
Security teams running legacy applications or internal services that still rely on HTTP basic auth will find bap's value in its simplicity: deploy a lightweight honeypot, collect real credential attempts, and feed that signal into incident response workflows without managing infrastructure. At 54 GitHub stars with zero dependencies, it's genuinely frictionless to stand up alongside existing apps. Skip this if you're looking for sophisticated multi-stage deception or you've already migrated to modern auth; bap does one thing and punts everything else to your monitoring layer.
