Express Honeypot vs Acalvio ShadowPlex: 2026 Comparison
Express Honeypot is a free honeypots & deception tool. Acalvio ShadowPlex is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Acalvio Technologies. 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:
Small teams running legacy applications vulnerable to file inclusion attacks will find Express Honeypot's focused approach valuable; it catches RFI and LFI scanning activity that generic WAFs often miss, and the free pricing removes the budget friction that kills honeypot pilots. The tool's simplicity,fake URLs that trigger on malicious requests,means deployment takes hours, not weeks. Skip this if you need honeypots for SSH, SQL injection, or credential harvesting; Express Honeypot is deliberately narrow in scope.
Mid-market and enterprise security teams with exposed APIs, web applications, or IoT infrastructure should use ShadowPlex to catch reconnaissance and credential attacks before they reach production systems. The platform's external-facing decoys generate high-fidelity threat intelligence in STIX format while monitoring for password spraying and brute-force attempts, directly addressing ID.RA and DE.CM in NIST CSF 2.0. Skip this if your attack surface is entirely internal or if you need deep visibility into post-breach lateral movement; ShadowPlex is optimized for early detection at the perimeter, not incident response.
