Honeyku vs Acalvio ShadowPlex: 2026 Comparison
Honeyku 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 lean deception programs on public cloud will find Honeyku useful for fast honeypot deployment without managing infrastructure; the free tier and Heroku integration mean you can spin up fake endpoints in minutes rather than weeks of procurement and architecture work. The 65 GitHub stars and active open-source maintenance suggest the project has actual operational users validating the approach. Skip this if your threat model requires honeypots integrated with a SIEM or incident response platform; Honeyku is detection-focused and leaves alerting and triage to you.
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.
