HonTel vs Twisted Honeypots: 2026 Comparison
HonTel is a free honeypots & deception tool. Twisted Honeypots 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 running legacy infrastructure with exposed Telnet ports should deploy HonTel to catch reconnaissance activity that IP reputation lists miss; it's free and requires minimal setup, making it practical for resource-constrained ops teams managing aging systems. With 162 GitHub stars and active maintenance, the tool delivers reliable signal for a narrowly focused attack surface. Skip this if your environment has already eliminated Telnet entirely or if you need honeypots covering SSH, HTTP, or databases; HonTel does one thing well and stops there.
Security teams with limited budgets who need SSH/FTP/Telnet honeypots for internal network monitoring should start with Twisted Honeypots; it's a working Python implementation that costs nothing and deploys in minutes rather than weeks. The 87 GitHub stars and active codebase signal genuine adoption among practitioners, not just research projects. Skip this if you need honeypots for web applications, DNS, or custom protocols, or if your team lacks Python fluency to maintain and customize the deployment.
