Ideagen Risk Management vs. KnowBe4 KCM GRC Platform (discontinued)

Pentana is great for monitoring PIs and risks. We find it less helpful for monitoring projects (with the Actions module); it isn't quite flexible enough for our needs, though the support team have been very helpful in adding custom fields for us.

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

• Pentana is excellent for monitoring, recording and reporting on PIs. Very easy to use the PI module.
• Pentana is excellent for monitoring risks at various levels (service, strategic etc.). Risks are displayed very clearly in a tree structure and the module is relatively easy to use.

• 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

• Pentana could improve the free Documents module that comes with Pentana Risk. At the moment documents have to be linked to an action in order to display query results (such as how many documents are due for review) - this can be confusing for users who don't understand why there is an action linked. There is also no easy way for users to see the documents that are assigned to them.
• We would like to use the Actions module fully in order to monitor our corporate projects, but it a bit confusing for users and not very flexible when a project doesn't mirror Pentana's way of monitoring actions.

• 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

Some modules are more user-friendly than others. It's sometimes not obvious where to click to update the fields (or even that field titles can be clicked on). We have written 'Howdys' to help users. There can also seem to be a lot of steps/clicks to updating risks and actions. The Reports module on Pentana classic is certainly not user-friendly, particularly the Report Layout and Charts modules - we were told these would be integrated into the web version but this hasn't happened yet.

The support team are excellent and always answer queries promptly. They are very helpful.

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

We selected Pentana because our neighbouring authorities are users and had spoken highly of the product and given us demonstrations; some of our staff were also familiar with Pentana when it was called Covalent. It seemed to be the best product on the market for monitoring risks, PIs and projects.

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

• Pentana Risk has allowed my team to focus on other areas of work whereas before we would be manually chasing for updates on PIs and risk. Pentana Risk does the chasing for us!
• We are able to produce reports for audit purposes very easily, rather than sending spreadsheets which is what we used to do.
• New managers can easily inherit risks, projects and PIs and see all of this on a custom portal, saving them time when they start.

• 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