Top 10 Best Honeypot Software of 2026

Cowrie is a mature, open-source medium to high-interaction SSH and Telnet honeypot designed to lure attackers and capture their brute-force attempts and shell interactions. It emulates a realistic Unix-like environment with fake filesystems, commands, processes, and outputs, logging every keystroke, file access, and download/upload in structured JSON format. This enables detailed analysis of attacker behavior, tactics, and tools without compromising real systems.

Thinkst Canary is a commercial honeypot platform that deploys realistic decoy sensors emulating common services like HTTP, SSH, databases, and more to lure and log attacker interactions. It provides detailed forensics, alerting, and threat intelligence through an intuitive dashboard, making it ideal for early breach detection. The solution integrates seamlessly with SIEMs and supports both virtual appliances and Docker for rapid deployment.

T-Pot (Community Edition) is an open-source honeypot platform developed by Deutsche Telekom Security that deploys over 20 different honeypot sensors, such as Cowrie, Dionaea, and Conpot, within a unified Docker-based environment on a single host. It simulates vulnerable services across multiple protocols to attract and log attacker interactions for threat intelligence gathering. The platform includes integrated tools like Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Suricata for data visualization, analysis, and attack detection.

Conpot is an open-source ICS/SCADA honeypot designed to emulate industrial control systems and protocols like Modbus, BACnet, Siemens S7comm, and SNMP. It creates realistic decoys to attract attackers targeting operational technology (OT) environments, capturing interactions for threat intelligence. The tool logs low-level protocol data, fingerprints attackers, and supports modular plugins for customization in cybersecurity research and defense.

Dionaea is an open-source, low-interaction honeypot designed to emulate vulnerable services across multiple protocols like SMB, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, and more to lure attackers and capture malware. It logs detailed attack data, downloads malicious payloads, and stores binaries for analysis, aiding in threat intelligence gathering. Developed by the Carnivore project, it focuses on scalability for deployment in sensor networks.

Honeytrap (honeytrap.io) is a lightweight, open-source honeypot framework written in Go that simulates vulnerable services to attract and log attacker interactions across multiple protocols like HTTP, SSH, and Telnet. It features a modular architecture with pluggable components for service emulation and event publishing to sinks such as Elasticsearch, Kafka, or files. This makes it suitable for threat intelligence gathering and network deception in security operations.

Glastopf is an open-source, medium-interaction web honeypot that emulates thousands of vulnerable web applications and files to lure and analyze web attackers. It dynamically generates realistic responses based on attacker inputs, logging payloads, exploits, and behaviors for security research. Supporting emulations of popular CMS like WordPress, Drupal, and phpMyAdmin, it provides detailed insights into web attack trends.

Honeyd is an open-source low-interaction honeypot that creates virtual hosts and networks on a single physical machine, simulating various services and operating systems to deceive attackers. It excels in generating fake network topologies and responding to probes in a realistic manner, aiding in threat intelligence and early attack detection. Though powerful for deception, it requires manual configuration via scripts and lacks modern GUI interfaces.

HoneyPy is a lightweight, low-interaction honeypot framework written in Python that enables users to quickly create and deploy custom honeypots for common network services like HTTP, SMTP, FTP, and more. It uses a modular plugin architecture to emulate service responses and capture attacker interactions, logging all connections, commands, and payloads for analysis and threat intelligence. Ideal for deception and early threat detection, it focuses on simplicity rather than deep emulation.

Artillery is an open-source honeypot framework written in Go, designed to simulate multiple network services and attract attackers for analysis. It supports protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SSH, Telnet, and MySQL, with customizable lures to mimic real applications. The tool captures detailed interaction logs, banners, and payloads to aid in threat intelligence and research.