HoneyDB vs HoneySMB: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
HoneyDB 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:
Security teams looking to understand what actually happens during reconnaissance and early-stage attacks should use HoneyDB for its free access to real attacker telemetry without infrastructure overhead. The platform aggregates data from distributed honeypots globally, giving you attack patterns and indicators of compromise that show up weeks before they hit public feeds. Skip this if your threat intelligence needs are satisfied by commercial feeds or if you lack the analyst capacity to operationalize raw honeypot signals into detection logic; HoneyDB requires interpretation, not turnkey alerts.
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.
