Dionaea vs HoneySMB: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Dionaea is a free honeypots & deception tool. HoneySMB 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:
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.
Small IT teams defending Windows environments with limited budget will get the most from HoneySMB; it's genuinely free and catches SMB reconnaissance and lateral movement that endpoint tools often miss because they're not looking at protocol-level deception. The GitHub presence suggests active development, and SMB-layer detection fills a specific gap in NIST Detect that most commercial honeypots ignore. Skip this if you need managed response or cross-protocol coverage; HoneySMB is a detection instrument, not a full deception platform, and assumes you have the engineering bandwidth to deploy and tune it yourself.
