KnowBe4 KCM GRC Platform (discontinued) vs. SANS Security Awareness Training

KnowBe4 KCM GRC Platform is well suited for a company that knows what they're doing compliance wise and needs to save time doing it. It won't be something you can spend a few hours on and then put on autopilot. It was made to create a rhythm within your own team, and you'll need to have the buy-in. It's useful for IT and Legal teams that already have a vendor risk management process, but want to have a better handle on it. Giving an outside auditor read-only access to a scope is also a huge time saver.

Incentivized

SANS Security Awareness Training program would be well suited for a large organization that needs to develop multiple training programs with different courses based on the roles of the end users. It seemed a bit difficult at times to achieve simple setup processes because of the configurations tailored to larger, more complex organizations.

Incentivized

• Mapping controls across different compliance frameworks. It saves you a ton of time and energy!
• Performing risk assessments at the granularity that you prefer, splitting assessments across departments and teams if you wish.

Incentivized

• Variety of cyber threat videos and presentations
• Web based and mobile access to the platform
• Easy to manage administrator access to configure the training sessions

Incentivized

• Vendor management has a few kinks to work out. We want to be able to do internal questionnaires for vendors as a compliance checklist before we sign off on a contract. Nothing in the works yet, but there are a few workarounds.
• The navigation between different tasks in scope is clunky, and it's easy to lose your place, and it forces you back to the main page of the scope to retrace your steps.

Incentivized

• Mass import of users was a bit confusing
• User interface was sometimes not intuitive
• Ability to upload custom content was difficult to use

Incentivized

Support from KnowBe4 KCM GRC Platform is always great. It's always in-house localized support, with excellent response times, and dedicated Customer Success Managers to answer the bulk of your questions or take your suggestions and make them a feature request. They will also reach out at least quarterly and do health checks to make sure you're using the platform to the best of your ability.

Incentivized

Quantivate and Fusion were the other two options we checked out. The quantity was high, and a good bit more expensive, but it was the best performing with its platform. They also had more modules that each cost extra to add to your subscription. KnowBe4 KCM GRC Platform was all-in-one and a little less mature, but the better buy. Fusion was hard to follow in the demo, and I was not overly impressed. I may have made my decision early enough in the demo to not pay much more attention to it.

Incentivized

We actually are currently migrating to Proofpoint Security Awareness Training because of its integration with the Proofpoint email filter. This will allow us to target specific users who are clicking on bad emails with specific training material. We have used KnowBe4 in the past as well, but it was rather costly compared to SANS Security Awareness Training and Proofpoint. SANS Security Awareness Training seems to be the least easy-to-use interface from an administrative perspective compared to the other two.

Incentivized

• Just having the capacity to do things the right way, and formally, has driven some of our compliance efforts.
• Due to licensing limitations, we likely overspent on seats to the platform that we didn't need but also didn't want to miss out on.

Incentivized

• Positive impact knowing we are educating our staff from phishing and potential cyber criminals
• Considering the potential for bad actors infiltrating our network, this is a small expense
• Pricing based on actual end users, worth the investment

Incentivized