Honey Ports vs Acalvio ShadowPlex: 2026 Comparison
Honey Ports 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:
Security teams running flat networks or lab environments who want to detect reconnaissance activity will find value in Honey Ports for its simplicity; Docker-based deployment means you're monitoring in minutes without infrastructure overhead. The free pricing and minimal dependencies make it practical for resource-constrained teams to stand up basic port-scan detection across internal segments. This isn't a fit for organizations needing sophisticated threat intelligence correlation, behavioral analysis, or integration with broader deception platforms; Honey Ports does one thing narrowly and well.
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.
