6 Best Infosec Alternatives for Security Awareness Training

InfoSec has established itself as a player in the security awareness training space, but here's the truth: one size doesn't fit all when it comes to protecting your organization from cyber threats. You might be exploring alternatives to Infosec because their pricing doesn't align with your budget, or perhaps you're seeking a more engaging training approach that resonates with your team culture.

Maybe you need deeper technical content, better integration capabilities, or simply want to evaluate all your options before making this critical investment. Or it could be a simple lack of features tailored to your specific operational demands, especially if you're a Managed Service Provider (MSP). If these concerns resonate, it's time to discover a better path forward.

This guide serves as your definitive resource for navigating the market and uncovering top-tier InfoSec Institute alternatives. Get ready to explore a quick comparison of our top picks, followed by in-depth reviews of each contender, helping you find the perfect partner to strengthen your human firewall.

Quick Comparison: Top Infosec Alternatives

To help you see the landscape at a glance, here’s a quick comparison of our top picks.

Deep Dive: The 6 Best Alternatives

Now that you have the big picture, let's dive into the details of each platform, starting with our top recommendation for MSPs and SMBs.

1. Symbol Security

Symbol Security is a modern, agile, and transparent solution perfect for organizations that need effectiveness without enterprise-level complexity or cost. It’s built on a "Human-Centric Security" philosophy and is purpose-built to serve Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Small to Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs) who need a powerful, easy-to-manage platform.

Key Features of Symbol Security

• Integrated SAT & Policy Management: The platform is an all-in-one solution for training, testing, and policy attestation. You can distribute key security policies and track employee acknowledgment, centralizing a critical compliance task.
• Actionable Risk Scoring: Symbol provides quantifiable metrics on your "human firewall." It tracks phish-prone percentages and training completion to generate an organizational risk score, showing progress over time.
• MSP-Centric Multi-Tenant Platform: Designed from the ground up for MSPs, this feature allows you to manage all clients from a single, intuitive dashboard. It streamlines billing, reporting, and campaign management, making security awareness a profitable service.
• Threat-Intel-Driven Phishing Simulations: Instead of relying on generic templates, Symbol uses intelligence from real-world attacks. This ensures your employees are tested against the sophisticated phishing lures they are most likely to encounter.

Strengths: Where Symbol Security Shines

• Simplicity and Ease of Use: The clean, modern interface means you can set up a phishing campaign or enroll users in training in just minutes. This lowers administrative overhead for busy IT teams.
• Exceptional MSP Focus: With co-branding, a multi-tenant dashboard, and a reseller-friendly model, Symbol makes it incredibly simple for MSPs to add security awareness training to their service stack.
• Transparent and Competitive Pricing: Symbol publishes its prices directly on its website, a refreshing contrast to the opaque quote-based models of its competitors. The generous free tier is perfect for small businesses or evaluations.

Limitations to Consider

• More Focused Content Library: Compared to enterprise giants like KnowBe4, Symbol’s training library is more curated and less expansive, focusing on core security topics.
• Prioritizes Core Phishing Vectors: The platform excels at email-based phishing simulations but has less developed capabilities for less common vectors like voice-phishing (vishing).

Pricing Structure

Symbol offers competitive pricing for customers depending on their needs.

Best Use Cases:

Ideal for Managed Service Providers looking to build a profitable security service and for Small to Medium-Sized Businesses that want a powerful, affordable, and easy-to-manage security awareness solution.

2. KnowBe4

KnowBe4 is the largest and most recognized platform in the security awareness training space. Its primary advantage is an enormous, diverse library of training content combined with advanced phishing simulation capabilities, making it a favorite in the mid-market and enterprise sectors.

Key Features of KnowBe4

• Massive Training Content Library: KnowBe4 offers a vast collection of interactive modules, videos, games, and posters in multiple languages, covering nearly every security topic imaginable.
• Advanced Phishing Simulations: The platform features thousands of realistic phishing templates, including those based on real-world attacks, and offers advanced capabilities like voice-phishing (vishing) tests.
• PhishER Incident Response: A standout feature is PhishER, a light SOAR tool that helps security teams automatically triage and respond to user-reported phishing emails, significantly reducing manual work.
• Comprehensive Risk Scoring: KnowBe4 tracks an organization's "Phish-prone Percentage"™ and assigns individual risk scores to users, helping identify and focus on the most vulnerable employees.

Strengths: Where KnowBe4 Shines

• Unparalleled Content Variety: No competitor matches the sheer volume of KnowBe4's content, allowing organizations to keep training fresh and cater to diverse learning styles.
• Integrated Incident Response Loop: PhishER closes the loop between user reporting and security team response, making it more than just a training tool-it's part of the defense-in-depth strategy.
• Strong Community and Brand Recognition: The company has built a powerful brand and community, providing valuable webinars, research, and thought leadership.

Limitations to Consider

• Inconsistent Content Quality: With such a massive library, the quality of training modules can be inconsistent, with some content feeling dated or overly simplistic.
• Cost and Complexity: KnowBe4 is a premium solution, and its most valuable features are locked behind expensive upper-tier plans. The platform's complexity can also create significant administrative overhead for smaller teams.

Pricing Structure

KnowBe4's pricing is quote-based and not publicly listed. It is sold in tiers (Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond), with costs generally ranging from $10 to $40+ per user per year, depending on the tier and user count.

Best Use Cases:

Best for mid-market to large enterprises with the budget and security maturity to leverage advanced features like PhishER and who require a vast, multi-language content library for compliance needs.

3. Cofense

Cofense operates on the principle that some phishing emails will always bypass technical defenses. Its platform is expertly designed to turn employees into an active threat detection network and to automate the security team's response to those user-reported threats.

Key Features of Cofense

• Automated Phishing Threat Triage: Cofense Triage is a powerful SOAR engine that automatically analyzes user-reported emails, enriches them with threat intelligence, and clusters similar attacks, saving SOC teams immense manual effort.
• Human-Centric Phishing Simulation: Building on its legacy as PhishMe, Cofense excels at creating highly realistic phishing simulations that effectively train users to spot and report threats.
• Enterprise-Wide Threat Quarantine: With Cofense Vision, security teams can instantly search all mailboxes for a confirmed threat and quarantine every instance in near real-time, stopping active attacks from spreading.
• Crowd-Sourced Threat Intelligence: Cofense leverages its global network of millions of trained users to generate high-fidelity intelligence on active phishing campaigns, often identifying threats before traditional feeds.

Strengths: Where Cofense Shines

• Powerful SOC Automation: Cofense Triage can reduce the time a SOC team spends on manual email analysis by over 90%, dramatically improving response times for active phishing attacks.
• Actionable, Human-Sourced Intelligence: The platform transforms employee reporting from a noisy distraction into a valuable intelligence source, identifying threats that have already bypassed expensive security gateways.
• Integrated End-to-End Defense: Cofense provides a seamless workflow from training and reporting to automated analysis and enterprise-wide remediation.

Limitations to Consider

• Premium Pricing Model: Cofense is a top-tier solution with a price tag to match, making it inaccessible for most SMBs.
• Not a Full SEG Replacement: It is designed to complement a Secure Email Gateway (SEG) like Proofpoint, not replace it. You will still need a separate solution for spam and malware filtering.

Pricing Structure

Cofense does not publish its pricing. It is sold on a per-user, per-year subscription model, and you must contact their sales team for a custom quote based on the modules you need.

Best Use Cases:

Ideal for large enterprises with a mature security program and a dedicated Security Operations Center (SOC) that is overwhelmed by user-reported phishing emails and needs to automate its incident response workflow.

4. Proofpoint

Proofpoint is a cybersecurity heavyweight, best known for its market-leading email security platform. It offers a comprehensive, integrated suite that combines advanced threat protection with security awareness training, data loss prevention, and compliance features, making it a go-to for large enterprises.

Key Features of Proofpoint

• Advanced Threat Protection (TAP): Proofpoint's flagship feature uses powerful sandboxing and threat intelligence to detect and block sophisticated threats like zero-day malware and business email compromise (BEC) that other systems miss.
• Integrated Security Awareness Training: Through its acquisition of Wombat Security, Proofpoint provides a highly-rated SAT platform that allows for phishing simulations and targeted training based on user behavior.
• Comprehensive Information Protection: The platform includes robust Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to prevent data exfiltration, policy-based email encryption, and archiving solutions.
• Threat Response Auto-Pull (TRAP): This feature automatically finds and quarantines malicious messages that were delivered to user inboxes before a threat was identified, closing a critical security gap.

Strengths: Where Proofpoint Shines

• Unmatched Threat Detection Efficacy: Proofpoint's ability to stop the most advanced email threats is consistently ranked as best-in-class by industry analysts.
• Comprehensive, Integrated Platform: Combining top-tier email security, DLP, archiving, and SAT under a single vendor reduces complexity and allows threat intelligence to be shared across modules.
• Exceptional Granularity and Control: The platform offers security professionals an extraordinary level of control to create highly specific rules for email routing, filtering, and policy enforcement.

Limitations to Consider

• High Cost of Ownership: Proofpoint is a premium solution with a premium price. The licensing costs are significant and often place it out of reach for all but the largest organizations.
• Significant Administrative Complexity: The platform is not a "set-it-and-forget-it" tool. It requires skilled security personnel to properly configure, tune, and manage its powerful but complex features.

Pricing Structure

Proofpoint operates on a quote-based, per-user/per-year subscription model. Pricing is not public and is highly modular, often resulting in an annual cost in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for mid-sized enterprises.

Best Use Cases:

Built for large enterprises, Fortune 1000 companies, and government agencies with a mature security team, a large budget, and complex compliance requirements.

5. Mimecast

Mimecast is a veteran in cloud-based email management, offering a unique, all-in-one platform that integrates security, archiving, and business continuity. It is a top choice for organizations in regulated industries that cannot afford any email downtime.

Key Features of Mimecast

• 100% Uptime Mailbox Continuity: Mimecast's standout feature ensures that if your primary email server goes down, employees can continue sending and receiving email through the Mimecast platform without interruption.
• Cloud-Based Enterprise Information Archiving: The platform includes an immutable cloud archive with a 7-second search SLA, making it ideal for eDiscovery and compliance. Legal teams can rapidly search and preserve data for regulatory requests.
• Multi-Layered Secure Email Gateway: Mimecast provides robust defense-in-depth against malware, spam, and targeted attacks with features like URL rewriting, attachment sandboxing, and impersonation protection.
• Integrated Security Awareness: The platform includes security awareness training modules and phishing simulations to help educate employees and reduce human error.

Strengths: Where Mimecast Shines

• Unmatched Email Resilience: The mailbox continuity feature is a powerful differentiator, guaranteeing 100% email availability during an outage of a primary mail server like Microsoft 365.
• Industry-Leading Archiving: Mimecast’s archiving and eDiscovery tools are considered best-in-class, far exceeding the native capabilities of most email platforms.
• All-in-One Platform: Combining security, archiving, and continuity from a single vendor simplifies administration and procurement.

Limitations to Consider

• Complexity and Steep Learning Curve: The administrative console is dense and powerful but can be unintuitive. It requires significant expertise and time to manage effectively.
• Legacy Gateway Architecture: Mimecast's traditional SEG architecture has a blind spot for internal threats originating from a compromised account, an area where modern API-based solutions excel.

Pricing Structure

Mimecast uses a quote-based pricing model that is not publicly available. It is sold on a per-user, per-month basis and is positioned at the higher end of the market, competing with Proofpoint.

Best Use Cases:

Best for mid-market to large enterprises, especially those in highly regulated industries like finance, legal, and healthcare, that prioritize compliance-grade archiving and absolute email uptime.

6. SANS Security Awareness

SANS Security Awareness is the training division of the SANS Institute, arguably the most trusted and respected name in cybersecurity education. This platform leverages the deep technical expertise of SANS's world-renowned researchers to deliver training focused on measurably changing user behavior.

Key Features of SANS Security Awareness

• Research-Backed, Expert-Developed Content: The training modules are created by the same leading cybersecurity experts who teach SANS technical courses, ensuring the content is accurate, timely, and relevant.
• Comprehensive Human Risk Management: The platform is designed not just to train but to measure and manage human risk, with tools for culture assessment and analytics that map outcomes to specific risk metrics.
• Advanced Phishing Simulation (PhishPro): This tool allows for highly customized phishing, vishing, and smishing campaigns with immediate, context-sensitive "teachable moments" for employees.
• Role-Based and Adaptive Learning Paths: SANS excels at providing specialized training for different roles, such as developers, executives, and system administrators, to address their unique risks.

Strengths: Where SANS Security Awareness Shines

• Unparalleled Credibility and Content Quality: The SANS brand carries immense weight. The content is considered the gold standard for accuracy and effectiveness, making it easier to gain executive buy-in.
• Focus on Behavioral Change: The entire methodology is built around driving lasting change, moving organizations from simple compliance checking to building a true security culture.
• Direct Alignment with the Threat Landscape: Content is constantly updated based on SANS's active research, ensuring employees are trained to defend against the very latest real-world threats.

Limitations to Consider

• Premium Pricing Structure: This is one of the most expensive security awareness solutions on the market, making it a non-starter for organizations with tight budgets.
• Less Emphasis on Gamification: The platform is more formal and academic in tone. Organizations looking for a heavily gamified or "fun" approach may find it less engaging for some employees.

Pricing Structure

SANS does not publish its pricing. It is sold on a per-user, per-year subscription model and requires a custom quote. It is widely recognized as a premium-tier product.

Best Use Cases:

The expert's choice for large enterprises with mature security programs that are focused on measurable risk reduction and are willing to invest in a best-in-class, research-backed solution.

How to Choose the Right Infosec Alternative

With so many great options, choosing can be tough. This section will help you decide based on your specific role and needs.

• If You're a Managed Service Provider (MSP): You need a multi-tenant dashboard, co-branding capabilities, and a reseller-friendly model that allows you to build a profitable service. Your clear choice is Symbol Security, as it was purpose-built to meet these exact requirements.
• If You're a Small or Medium-Sized Business: You value ease of use, affordability, and transparent pricing. You need a powerful solution that doesn't require a dedicated administrator to manage. Symbol Security's is affordable and high-value compared to players like Knowbe4.
• If You're a Large Enterprise with a Dedicated SOC: You need deep analytics, SOC automation, and vast content libraries to manage risk at scale. Consider Cofense for automating your incident response or KnowBe4 for its unparalleled content breadth and PhishER tool.
• If Budget is Not a Constraint and Credibility is Everything: You're looking for the gold standard in expert-led, research-backed content to satisfy auditors and drive measurable behavioral change. SANS Security Awareness is your top contender.

Picking The Right Infosec Alternative for You

The "best" Infosec alternative truly depends on your organization's size, budget, security maturity, and primary goals. Whether you need SOC automation, enterprise compliance, or a reseller-friendly platform, there is a solution on this list tailored to your needs.

However, for the vast majority of SMBs and virtually all MSPs, Symbol Security offers the ideal balance of powerful features, ease of use, and transparent, affordable pricing. It provides the critical tools you need to build a strong human firewall without the enterprise-level cost and complexity.

Ready to see how simple and effective security awareness can be? Start for free with Symbol Security today.