Project Artillery vs HonTel: 2026 Comparison
Project Artillery is a free honeypots & deception tool. HonTel 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:
Teams with limited security budgets who need to catch misconfigurations before attackers do will find Project Artillery's honeypot-plus-alerting approach genuinely useful for detection work. At zero cost with 1,045 GitHub stars, it's proven enough for small-to-medium shops to deploy without procurement friction. Skip this if you need managed threat hunting or want someone else owning the infrastructure; Project Artillery requires you to run and maintain the honeypots yourself.
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.
