SSHHiPot vs sshd-honeypot: 2026 Comparison
SSHHiPot 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:
Security teams hunting lateral movement and SSH compromise patterns will get the most from SSHHiPot because its high-interaction design captures actual attacker behavior and proxy commands instead of just connection logs. The 173 GitHub stars and active maintenance signal a tool that security practitioners actually run, not one abandoned in a repository. Skip this if you need production-grade alerting or centralized log ingestion; SSHHiPot is a detection sensor first, and you'll be writing your own parsing and forwarding logic to feed signals downstream.
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.
