KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training

Score8.9 out of 10

1,165 Reviews and Ratings

What is KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training?

KnowBe4 is a security awareness and compliance training and simulated social engineering product. It is used by organizations worldwide to strengthen their security culture and reduce risk.

The product includes a comprehensive suite of awareness and compliance training, real-time user coaching, AI-powered simulated social engineering, crowdsourced anti-phishing defense and an AI suite that enhances risk management through personalized training and automation. With content in 35+ languages, KnowBe4 provides an always-fresh library of engaging content to strengthen an organization's security culture.

KnowBe4 provides:

Baseline testing to assess the Phish-Prone™ Percentage of users through a free simulated phishing attack
Fully automated simulated phishing attacks, using thousands of customizable templates with unlimited usage
AI-Driven phishing and training recommendations based on users' phishing and training history
Enterprise strength reporting, showings stats and graphs for both training and phishing, ready for management
Artificial Intelligence Defense Agents (AIDA), AI-powered agents that reduce admin burden by automating template generation, training and reporting

Categories & Use Cases

Security Awareness Training

Media

Screenshot of The Phishing Dashboard. This displays how end users are doing at-a-glance and in comparison to peers across industries with Industry Benchmarking.

Screenshot of KnowBe4's partners, including The Security Awareness Company, Popcorn Training, exploqii, Twist & Shout, El Pescador, CLTRe, Saya University, and MediaPRO. Together, they create security awareness training content available in the ModStore.

Screenshot of A security training quiz question showing "Security Moments Series: Spot the Bad Link" asking what Lisa should do when receiving an unexpected email with an HTML attachment, with three answer options and Submit/Cancel buttons.

Screenshot of The AIDA Phishing Template Generator interface, which displays a customizable phishing simulation tool with template setup options on the left and a preview of a generated "Annual Bonus Announcement" email featuring a QR code attack vector on the right.

Screenshot of The AIDA Configure Training interface, which displays settings for personalized remedial phishing training, including user enrollment options, completion timeframes, knowledge refresher schedules, and notification preferences, with an "Activate Remedial Training" button to implement the configuration.

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Screenshot of The Phishing Dashboard. This displays how end users are doing at-a-glance and in comparison to peers across industries with Industry Benchmarking.

Phishing Simulations
Administrators can run simulated phishing attacks to test the effectiveness of the training and assess vulnerabilities.
Category average: 8.9
Single sign-on capability
The software system supports a centralized authentication mechanism allowing the user to access multiple systems with a single, centrally managed password.
Category average: 9
Role-based user permissions
Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration.
Category average: 8.8

Integration with Security Tech Stack
The product integrates with other security tools, such as a SIEM or SOAR platform, and may provide alerts for potential breaches.
Category average: 8.2
Training Gamification
Training content is available in a gamified format.
Category average: 7.8
Industry-Specific Security Training
Security training can be tailored based on industry-specific requirements, such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, etc.
Category average: 7.9

Most Frequent Users

Top 3 industries using KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training.

Based on HG Insights installation data

View all Reviews

#1 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

16.9%

109 installations of 644

#2 most frequent

Manufacturing

14.4%

93 installations of 644

“We currently use KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training to send phishing campaigns to our users monthly.”
— Senior Network Administrator, Kingston Technology

#3 most frequent

Finance and Insurance

11.0%

71 installations of 644

Pros

Extensive and diverse training content library.
Effective and customizable phishing simulation campaigns.
High ease of use and accessibility for end-users.

Cons

Some reviewers find it challenging to quantify the exact return on investment.
Mixed sentiment regarding the authenticity of phishing simulations, with some users feeling tricked.

Eric Stewart

Director of Technology and Facilities in Information Technology at Purdue Polytechnic High School (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use KnowBe4 to educate, test, and retrain our staff to go from liability in network security to become a "human firewall". Quarterly testing is completed with phishing campaigns. Users that fall for the emails are assigned short educational videos to help increase their phishing awareness.

Pros

Generates phishing campaigns that rank from the obvious to highly sophisticated
Provides timely and relevant training to users
The dashboard provides a quantifiable risk assessment of our organization. Something that can be difficult to gather with no program in place.

Cons

The one thing I would say is that users that are assigned training will forget their passwords and that becomes a bit of a hassle after a campaign
The ironic thing is that training emails after a user clicks on a campaign email is often flagged as phishing.

Return on Investment

We have created a phishing awareness culture in our organization where staff take pride in making sure potential phish schemes are flagged for review.
There are numerous instances where active phishing attempts to gain access to data or to steal funds are flagged and stopped before any real damage to our institution occurs.

Usability

Other Software Used

Adobe Acrobat, Alma SIS, Lightspeed Filter

Shubham sahu

Security Consultant in Information Technology at Planful Inc. (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

This helps in getting all employees get basic security awareness training and it helped a lot from phishing attacks and many more attacks

Pros

Providing information on Latest security trends
Providing information on Common attacks

Cons

More contents on developers secure code training needed

Return on Investment

An attack can cost a huge loss , so comparatively investing on employees training and Knowbe4 is completely worth

Alternatives Considered

Coursera and Mimecast Awareness Training

Other Software Used

Mimecast Awareness Training

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training in our organization to provide company-wide security awareness training to all of our employees. We generally provide training on social engineering topics and compliance training. For Non-IT employees, we provide trainings where less technical terms are used and for IT people, we use highly technical trainings like Kevin Mitnick trainings. Before using the KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training, we were facing a lot of issues on spam and phishing emails. Our employees were not able to identify difference between a real and phishing email and we were facing account compromise issues as well but after implementing this training, we are seeing a lot of difference and seeing a positive growth at the organization level. Since employees are not getting into phishing and vishing attacks, we have seen confidence in users and also protecting them from account compromise. From Knowbe4, we have purchased Security Awareness Training, PhishER and Security Coach and we are using all of them to protect our data and to educate our employees.

Pros

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training has well-designed videos on almost every topic of social engineering attacks, making it the best in the market. It has less technical videos for Non-IT people and high technical like KMSAT for IT people other than cyber security guys.
KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training has a good phishing test campaign feature from which you can launch a phishing test for all or a selected group of people to test them on a real phishing test environment.
KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training has a good number of security related games and quizzes that makes the training part funny and attractive.
KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training provides monthly newsletters and posters that we can use to send to all employees to make them aware of the current security scenarios.

Cons

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training has a good amount of videos but they still have fewer videos with different lengths on top priority topics like Phishing attacks, Smishing attacks, Vishing attacks, etc. They should add more videos with different lengths on these topics.
KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training does not update its video inventory called 'ModStore' with the latest and trending topics of cyber security. They should review and add videos every week with the latest trends in the security.
Security Coach that comes with the Diamond Subscription of KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training is a good feature but it is very difficult to implement it. You have to provide all your organization's data to this application so that it can read all and can generate alerts on that basis.

Return on Investment

The KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training has had a very positive impact on our organization. After implementing this, our end users are educated and now they can make a difference between a clean email and a phishing email.
After implementing the training, we are seeing a very less number of clicks on a phishing link and hence we have improved our data breach rate.
With the KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training, we have minimized the account compromise rate because users are aware and they are not getting fooled by a phishing email.
With KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training, we have gained trust from outside customers on a security level.

Alternatives Considered

Mimecast Awareness Training

Other Software Used

Atera, Microsoft Defender for Identity, KnowBe4 PhishER/PhishER Plus

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize the KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training Platform to provide cybersecurity awareness training to all our staff. The various lessons and quizzes allow a holistic view of key cybersecurity concepts and how those can be utilized by bad actors to gain access to a system or a physical location of high security. Through the use of repeated training sessions, we have been able to address one of the IT Awareness Requirements of the organization in order to enhance security across the board whilst ensuring that all personnel have security awareness as part of their second nature. We like how the platform allows us to track the individual scores of our users so that we may identify those that may require additional training. Thus far, we are now incorporating the scores obtained from these KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training sessions as part of their appraisals so that they are more enticed to willingly undergo the training. It has particularly been of great help with the older generation so that they understand why certain things need to be done differently now as compared to before.

Pros

Lessons
Quizzes
Score Tracking
Holistic overview of the organization's combined score
Comparisons and benchmarking against businesses of similar nature

Cons

User group assignments could be done at the user level. It's tedious to have to go into each group and remove a user from it.
A report to compare time based scores would be great. For example, compare the organization's score now against three months ago to see the improvements.
Some of the quizzes are too long as they incorporate everything, maybe create quizzes based on some category or another. Like a dedicated quiz just for phishing, etc.

Return on Investment

Increased Cybersecurity awareness for all of our users.
Our initial scores were low compared to similar businesses, but after a year, we were a bit on par. Four years later and we are above certain industry standards.
We have made it part of our onboarding process as well as annual appraisals, thereby involving our HR department in every step.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Sophos Intercept X

Other Software Used

Sophos Intercept X, Fortinet FortiGate, Auvik

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training to ensure all of our employees are being tested for phishing, and malicious attacks. This ensures our environment is kept secure as our employees are the easiest vector for a malicious actor to attack. We use this solution for multiple organizations with over 100 employees currently.

Pros

Ease of setup
Automated testing
Automated training
Ease of use

Cons

I would like multiple organization when connecting to M365 tenants
Easier to change phishing campaigns, once created
Add the ability to change training content within an existing campaign

Return on Investment

We were able to leverage this solution when applying for cybersecurity insurance, lowering our costs and premiums
I have been able to use this data to further train and teach our employees to be safe when using their email. This has an almost unquantifiable value, as we have very little risk of breach because of KnowBe4
I have noticed that my employees are far more hesitant to click on any emails now, always deferring to the "trust until verified" way of thinking

Usability

Other Software Used

NinjaOne, Xink, KnowBe4 Cloud Email Security

Cofense PhishMe

Proofpoint Security Awareness Training

Infosec IQ

Mimecast Security Behavior Management

Hoxhunt

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training

What is KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training?

Categories & Use Cases

Media