HoneyPy vs HoneySMB: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Short answer

Security teams building threat intelligence pipelines on a tight budget should run HoneyPy; its plugin architecture lets you customize deception across SSH, HTTP, and custom services without licensing friction. The 472 GitHub stars and active maintenance signal reliable community support for a free tool that actually gets deployed, not abandoned after week one. Skip it if you need managed threat hunting or high-interaction simulation of Windows environments; HoneyPy excels at catching reconnaissance and low-sophistication attacks on Linux-based infrastructure, not mimicking complex enterprise systems. 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.