Kippo Detect vs sshd-honeypot: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Kippo Detect is a free honeypots & deception tool. sshd-honeypot 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:
Penetration testers and red teamers who need to validate whether their own SSH honeypots are externally detectable will find Kippo Detect useful for that specific audit. The tool directly fingerprints Kippo instances over the network, catching a common misconfiguration that leaves honeypots exposed. Skip this if you're looking for a general-purpose honeypot detection framework or broader deception monitoring; Kippo Detect does one thing and won't tell you about Cowrie, Dionaea, or other SSH trap variants.
Security teams running Linux infrastructure who want to observe actual attacker behavior on exposed SSH ports should deploy sshd-honeypot; it intercepts brute force attempts and shell commands in real time without the overhead of full Cowrie instances. The setup is straightforward,a modified OpenSSH daemon that logs to Cowrie,and costs nothing, making it practical for teams that need threat intelligence on SSH reconnaissance patterns. Skip this if you need centralized log aggregation, alerting, or forensics across multiple honeypots; sshd-honeypot is a thin instrumentation layer, not a management platform.
