Acalvio ShadowPlex vs Spam Honeypot Tool: 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. Spam Honeypot Tool 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 running mail infrastructure who want to understand spam patterns without deploying commercial honeypot solutions will find Spam Honeypot Tool useful for its low-friction setup; it simulates an open relay to capture real attack traffic, giving you genuine threat intelligence at zero cost. The tool's active GitHub repository and open-source design mean you can inspect exactly what it's logging and modify it for your environment. This is a hands-on option for smaller teams or research, not a replacement for enterprise deception platforms that offer managed alert correlation and cross-channel honeypot coordination.
