pghoney vs CatchProbe SmartDeceptive: 2026 Comparison
pghoney is a free honeypots & deception tool. CatchProbe SmartDeceptive is a commercial honeypots & deception tool by CatchProbe. 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, integrations, company size fit, here is our conclusion:
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.
Mid-market and enterprise security teams defending OT/ICS environments will find CatchProbe SmartDeceptive's protocol-level trap deployment invaluable; it's one of the few deception platforms that actually speaks SCADA and industrial protocols instead of just HTTP. The AI-driven trap placement cuts false positives that plague manual honeypot setups, and hybrid deployment means you can bait attackers on both cloud and plant floors. Skip this if your threat model is purely cloud-native SaaS applications or if you need a deception tool that doubles as a full detection platform; SmartDeceptive is explicitly built to feed threat intelligence into your existing security stack, not replace it.
