Acalvio ShadowPlex vs pghoney: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Acalvio ShadowPlex is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by Acalvio Technologies. pghoney 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 NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
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.
Security teams building internal deception infrastructure on a shoestring budget should start with pghoney if they're already running Postgres; it requires minimal setup and gives you a working honeypot in an afternoon rather than weeks of custom development. The 20 GitHub stars and active fork history show it's been battle-tested enough to catch real reconnaissance traffic against database ports. Skip this if you need honeypots across multiple database types or platforms; pghoney is deliberately single-purpose and won't replace a full deception platform like Honeyd or commercial equivalents.
