Adaptive Security Awareness Training: The 10 Platforms Worth Shortlisting in 2026

Key takeaways

• The 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report found the human element present in 62% of breaches, and 41% of social engineering breaches in that report involved vectors other than email.
• A randomized controlled trial at UC San Diego Health, published by Grant Ho and colleagues at IEEE S&P 2025, ran monthly simulations against more than 19,500 employees for eight months and found that embedded training reduced failure rates by 1.7% against the control group.
• In the UC San Diego Health trial, between 37% and 51% of training sessions lasted zero seconds, and only 15% to 24% of sessions were completed. The lesson most platforms serve after a click is the lesson almost nobody opens.
• The SANS 2026 Security Awareness and Culture Report puts the cost of moving past compliance at three or more dedicated staff and three to five years to change workforce behaviour.
• Brightside AI personalizes all four layers: it matches the attack to each employee’s role and context across email and live AI phone calls, grades email difficulty on the NIST Phish Scale, routes training through dynamic groups that update themselves, and delivers courses as a branching chat rather than a fixed video.
• We ranked ten platforms on eight criteria: which layer they personalize, what feeds the risk score, how segmentation is automated, whether personalization reaches past email, whether difficulty sits on a published scale, what happens at the moment of failure, whether the lesson itself adapts, and what the employer and the employee each get to see.

The trial that should worry every buyer in this category is the one at UC San Diego Health. Grant Ho and colleagues ran monthly phishing simulations against more than 19,500 employees for eight months, gave some of them the standard embedded training after a click, and found the training reduced failure rates by 1.7% against the control group. Vendors read that result as an argument for personalization: the training didn’t work because it was the same for everyone. That reading is plausible. It is also, so far, unproven, because nobody has published an equivalent trial showing that adaptive training does better.

So every vendor in this guide claims personalized and adaptive training, and the claim covers four different machines. One matches the attack to the person. One adjusts difficulty and cadence to how the person performed last time. One decides which course they get from a risk score. And one, rarely, changes the lesson itself as the learner moves through it. Most platforms build one or two of the four. We’ve sorted ten of them by which layers they actually build, for a security lead who has watched generic annual training stall and is putting together a shortlist.

What is a personalized and adaptive security training platform?

A personalized and adaptive security training platform is one where what an employee receives, an attack or a lesson, depends on who they are and what they did last time. That definition covers four distinct mechanisms, and a buyer who doesn’t separate them ends up comparing a difficulty engine against a course library and calling it a tie.

The first layer matches the attack to the person. The simulation a given employee receives is chosen or generated from what is known about them, so a marketer gets an ad-platform lure and an accounts payable clerk gets an invoice. Brightside’s AI OSINT spear-phishing works at this layer: instead of an admin picking a template, Brightside matches the attack to each employee’s role and context the way a real attacker would target them, so a marketer receives a convincing email that appears to come from Meta Ads, addressed to them by name. Adaptive Security works here too, and says its simulations draw on more than a thousand open-source signals per employee, which is a vendor figure. Jericho Security says it feeds dark web data into the same process.

The second layer adapts difficulty and cadence to performance. The platform observes what this person did with the last simulation and adjusts the next one. Hoxhunt is the clearest example and states the design goal openly: keep each learner inside the zone of proximal development, the band where the material is neither too hard nor too easy. Repeat clickers move to a faster cadence until they improve, then return to baseline. SoSafe runs roughly one simulated email per user per month with difficulty that adjusts to individual performance.

The third layer adapts training assignment to risk. Who gets which course, and when, is decided by a score rather than by a calendar, and this is where most of the 2026 product investment has gone. Proofpoint ships it as Adaptive Groups, which segment users automatically from threat, identity, awareness and DLP signals, and Adaptive Pathways, which enrol those groups into a tailored sequence of microlearning, simulations and nudges. KnowBe4 ships it as a fleet of agents, of which the AIDA Orchestration Agent plans, launches and manages both simulations and training at the individual level.

The fourth layer adapts the lesson itself. This is the layer nearly everyone skips, because it requires course content built for branching rather than sliced from a video library. Brightside delivers its courses as a chat guided by Brighty, an interactive learning companion, with information arriving in short chunks and branching interactions that let learners explore choices, situations and consequences. Quizzes, mini-games, audio and video can appear where they support the objective rather than as an end-of-module formality.

Two mechanics sit underneath all four. The risk score is what layers two and three run on, and scores differ on inputs far more than on maths. Brightside scores risk per employee and per group from simulation behaviour, course progress and exposure factors including appearance in known data breaches, with the highest-risk people listed first. Infosec IQ’s human risk layer pulls signals from SIEM, EDR, SOAR and DLP tools, which is a different kind of input entirely: what the employee did in production rather than in a drill. The group is how personalization scales, because at a thousand seats it is really automated segmentation. Brightside’s dynamic groups update themselves from employee data and ship ready-made for employees at high risk, employees with a high simulation failure rate, new hires from the last 90 days, employees overdue for a course, and employees found in a data breach in the last 90 days.

Why does any of this now sit in a compliance conversation? Because every framework revised recently moved from “train everyone” toward “train each person for their role.” ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A control 6.3 requires awareness, education and training “as relevant for their job function.” PCI DSS v4.0 Requirement 12.6.3.1, mandatory since 31 March 2025, names phishing and related social engineering specifically and requires training to address personnel’s role in protecting cardholder data. DORA Article 13(6) requires ICT security awareness programmes with complexity “commensurate to the remit” of the staff receiving them. NIS2 Article 20(2) requires management bodies to follow training that lets them identify and assess cybersecurity risks, and requires similar training for employees on a regular basis. NIST SP 800-50r1, published 12 September 2024, folded the withdrawn SP 800-16 role-based training model into one learning-program document.

And to be fair to the frameworks, none of them asks for adaptive difficulty, behavioural risk scores or AI-generated lures. All of them ask for training that differs by role and stays current with threats. That is a lower bar than the vendors are selling against, and an organization can clear it with dynamic groups and a decent course library. What the extra layers buy you is the part the frameworks can’t require: an employee who actually reads the lesson.

What to look for in a personalized and adaptive training platform

Which layer does it personalize?

A good answer names which of the four it does and can show you the difference between two employees. Two or more layers, and the vendor can say which. A weak answer is the word “personalized” applied to everything. To check it, ask for a per-employee timeline over 90 days for two people in different roles and look at what actually varied: the lure, the difficulty, the course assigned, or the course content itself. Brightside can show all four varying, and the fourth is the one you’ll most often see missing.

What feeds the risk score?

The score decides everything downstream in layers two and three, and no two vendors build it from the same inputs. A good answer names inputs beyond drill behaviour: breach exposure, reporting speed, course progress, production telemetry. Ask to see one employee’s score broken into its inputs, and ask which inputs carry more weight. None of the ten vendors here publishes weights, so treat any score as a construct rather than a measurement, and don’t compare a Brightside score with a KnowBe4 score as if they were the same number. Our human risk scoring guide goes deeper on what a defensible score is made of.

How is segmentation automated?

At scale, personalization is group membership. A good answer is dynamic groups that update themselves from employee data, with useful ones shipped ready-made so the admin isn’t writing rules on day one. Ask what happens to a group’s membership when a new hire arrives or someone fails twice. If the answer involves a person editing a list, the personalization stops the day that person gets busy.

Does personalization reach past email?

The 2026 Verizon DBIR reports that 41% of social engineering breaches involved vectors other than email, with roughly a quarter arriving through social media or phone channels. A platform that personalizes email lures and never touches the phone has personalized the smaller half of the problem. A good answer applies the same personalization to a real outbound call with a live two-way agent. Ask what the vendor’s voice product actually does, because six different things are sold under the word vishing: a live call, a keypad robocall, a browser audio session, a managed engagement by human callers, an email with a phone number in it, or nothing. We’ve written up the difference between a live call and a recorded one and what each one trains.

Is difficulty on a published scale?

The UC San Diego trial found failure rates ranging from 1.8% for an “Outlook Password” pretext to 30.8% for a “Vacation Policy” one, a seventeen-fold spread driven entirely by the choice of lure. If difficulty is assigned by feel, a “difficulty level” attached to an employee is partly measuring the pretext rather than the person. A good answer is a named scale, the NIST Phish Scale, rather than Easy, Medium, Hard. Ask what makes a “hard” template hard and listen for whether the answer names a scale or a person’s judgement. Brightside grades its email templates on the NIST Phish Scale from Least Difficult to Very Difficult, and Proofpoint computes NIST-based difficulty for email.

What happens at the moment of failure?

The UC San Diego engagement numbers make this criterion unavoidable. Between 37% and 51% of remedial training sessions in that trial lasted zero seconds, and only 15% to 24% were completed. A generic module queued for later is a module nobody opens. A good answer puts the specific attack that fooled the employee in front of them immediately, with the red flags marked. Brightside shows a failing employee the exact email that got them, with every red flag highlighted, the moment they click or enter credentials. To test any vendor, fail a simulation on the demo account yourself and look at what appears.

Does it adapt the lesson, not just the assignment?

Assigning a different fixed video to a different employee is layer three. Layer four is a course that branches and checks understanding as the learner moves. Brightside’s chat-based courses do this, with branching interactions and knowledge checks placed where they serve the learning goal. Take a course on the demo account twice, answering differently each time, and see whether anything changes.

What does the employer see, and what does the employee?

The inputs that make a simulation convincing are the inputs that make an employee feel watched. A good answer gives the security team per-employee visibility where it is needed, draws a clear line around anything personal, and avoids punitive mechanics. Ask what an employee can see about their own record, and whether any badge or list is negative. Brightside keeps whatever an employee adds in their own Personal Portal, including personal email addresses and their breach results, invisible to the employer, and its nine achievements are positive-only, with no wall of shame.

How we evaluated

We asked the eight questions above of every platform. The first and the last carried the most weight, because which layers a vendor builds is the buying decision and how an employee is treated decides whether the program survives its first backlash. What counted as evidence was how deeply each vendor documents the mechanism rather than the claim: named fields, published scales, help-centre articles, API specifications, and the vendor’s own product pages.

On G2, Adaptive Security holds 4.9 out of 5, Hoxhunt 4.8, Arsen 4.8, KnowBe4 4.6, SoSafe 4.5, Proofpoint ZenGuide 4.5, Infosec IQ 4.5 and Brightside 4.4. Adaptive Security also holds 4.9 out of 5 on Gartner Peer Insights. Vendor-published outcome figures like “20x fewer risky clicks” are marketing until a methodology appears, because none of them is a controlled comparison. If you want to measure your own program’s effect, our guide to measuring security awareness training covers which metrics survive scrutiny.

1. Brightside AI

Brightside AI is a Swiss security awareness platform built around realistic attack simulation across email and voice, and the only platform in this comparison that personalizes all four layers: the attack, the difficulty, the assignment, and the lesson itself. Brightside holds 4.4 out of 5 on G2.

What does Brightside AI do well?

Brightside’s AI OSINT spear-phishing matches the attack to each employee’s role and context and translates it into the employee’s own language automatically. Brightside grades every email template on the NIST Phish Scale from Least Difficult to Very Difficult, and never sends the same attack to the same employee twice.

Brightside’s voice channel is a live AI phone call where the agent adapts to what the employee says, steered by a goal, a persona, up to three influence techniques, a tone and a voice, across Voice, Voice + BEC and BEC attack types. A one to two minute recording is enough to clone a voice for the call. One reviewer on G2 wrote: “I like that Brightside AI makes it easy to clone voices and create templates. The engine seems to work well and is effective, which makes it a great starting point. The interface is also very intuitive and useful, especially for certain functions. Additionally, I am able to create awareness about deep-fake threats. I appreciate how it manages to raise the level of awareness among collaborators about the availability of public or stolen data.”

When an employee clicks, Brightside shows them the exact email that fooled them, with every red flag highlighted, immediately. Brightside’s courses run as a chat guided by Brighty, an interactive learning companion, with branching interactions and knowledge checks placed where they serve the course’s goal. Brightside’s dynamic groups update themselves and ship ready-made for high-risk employees, new hires and employees found in a breach in the last 90 days.

What to know before you buy

AI spear-phishing sits on the Pro tier. Vishing, including voice cloning, requires Pro or the Voice add-on, which has a ten-seat minimum. Video deepfake simulations are a managed service scoped per engagement; audio deepfakes, through voice cloning, are self-serve. Brightside’s course library runs to dozens of titles, a smaller catalog than the large suites carry.

Best for

Teams that want the attack matched to the person on email and the phone, and a lesson afterwards that employees actually finish.

2. Adaptive Security

Adaptive Security is the closest peer to Brightside on the attack side and ahead of it on reporting. It personalizes the attack and drives assignment from the widest documented risk score in this field, and it holds 4.9 out of 5 on both G2 and Gartner Peer Insights.

What does Adaptive Security do well?

Adaptive Security assigns every employee a continuously updating risk score built from simulation behaviour, training completion, open-source exposure, credential breach history and reporting speed, and says its simulations draw on more than a thousand open-source signals per employee. Adaptive Security runs vishing as a first-class channel in the same campaign object as email and SMS, with a live two-way agent that navigates IVR phone trees to reach a human and can target shared numbers, help desks and call centres. Adaptive Security’s voice cloning and deepfake video are both self-serve, the latter through AI Personas in beta from an image, a short audio clip and a script. Adaptive Security’s groups are dynamic and typed GENERAL, NEW_HIRE and REMEDIATION, and remediation runs on rules through a Phish Remediation page with Program Rules and Performance tabs. Adaptive Security’s reporting runs to more than fifty pre-built reports, Report Boards with AI-written narrative summaries, and PowerPoint export.

Where does Adaptive Security fall short?

Adaptive Security’s attack-design control is thinner than its reporting: an admin sets a persona category and a difficulty, and difficulty is Easy, Medium or Hard against no published scale. Adaptive Security has no branching lesson layer; assignment adapts, the course does not. Brightside exposes goal, persona with free-text context, three influence techniques, tone and first message on every voice template and grades email difficulty on the NIST Phish Scale. Our Brightside vs Adaptive Security comparison walks the two side by side.

Best for

Enterprise teams that want the broadest risk-score inputs and the deepest reporting, with self-serve deepfake video, and can live with less control over how each attack is built.

3. Hoxhunt

Hoxhunt is the field’s reference implementation of adaptive difficulty and cadence, the second layer, wrapped in a gamified program that employees tend to keep playing. Hoxhunt holds 4.8 out of 5 on G2.

What does Hoxhunt do well?

Hoxhunt’s engine adjusts difficulty, cadence and scenario type per user, sending simulations roughly every ten days, with repeat clickers moved to a faster cadence until they improve and then returned to baseline. Hoxhunt lands a micro-lesson at the moment the employee reports or clicks, and every report and click updates the model. Hoxhunt runs engagement on badges, streaks and leaderboards rather than penalties. Hoxhunt’s deepfake video product is real and vendor-built: a phishing email leads to a browser page skinned as Teams, Meet or Zoom where a cloned executive on video asks for a link click.

Where does Hoxhunt fall short?

Hoxhunt’s voice product never places a phone call. It is an AI voice agent holding an adaptive audio conversation inside a browser or app session, Hoxhunt itself calls it Training rather than simulation, and Hoxhunt publishes no voice-specific metric. Hoxhunt’s difficulty is adaptive but sits on no published scale. Brightside rehearses the call on the device the attack actually arrives on, with a live agent on a real outbound call. Our Brightside vs Hoxhunt comparison covers the trade between gamified engagement and attack-design depth.

Best for

Large workforces where sustained engagement with email phishing training is the goal, and the phone is someone else’s problem.

4. Proofpoint ZenGuide

Proofpoint ZenGuide is the cleanest implementation of the third layer, risk-driven assignment, and the strongest difficulty methodology for email in this comparison. Proofpoint ZenGuide holds 4.5 out of 5 on G2.

What does Proofpoint ZenGuide do well?

Proofpoint’s Adaptive Groups segment users automatically from risk signals spanning real-time threat, identity, awareness and DLP indicators, so a user who clicked a malicious link lands in a group that receives training addressing that behaviour, and membership updates as profiles change. Proofpoint’s Adaptive Pathways enrol those groups into a tailored set of microlearning, simulations and nudges, with admins writing the rules, for example finance staff who have triggered two DLP alerts. Proofpoint computes difficulty rather than assigning it, through Machine-Learning Leveled Phishing built on the NIST Phish Scale using both cues and premise alignment, for email.

Where does Proofpoint ZenGuide fall short?

Proofpoint ZenGuide has no voice capability. Proofpoint’s vishing story is a TOAD email template whose call to action is a phone number, so the failure event is still an email interaction. Proofpoint’s difficulty computation covers email only. Brightside personalizes the attack on a live phone call as well as in the inbox, and puts the same employee in both. Our Brightside vs Proofpoint comparison is written for teams already inside the Proofpoint stack.

Best for

Teams already running Proofpoint’s email security, who want risk signals from that stack to decide who gets trained.

5. KnowBe4

KnowBe4 has rebuilt personalization as a fleet of agents on top of the largest content library in the field. KnowBe4 holds 4.6 out of 5 on G2.

What does KnowBe4 do well?

KnowBe4’s AIDA suite had twelve agents in market during 2026, including an Orchestration Agent that plans, launches and manages simulations and training at the individual level without admin involvement, an Ongoing Training Agent for continuous assignment against risk profile, a Remedial Training Agent that assigns targeted training the moment a user fails a simulation, and a Phishing Agent that tailors simulated attacks to each user’s role. KnowBe4’s SmartRisk Agent produces risk scores at user, group and organizational level from behavioural data across KnowBe4’s products. KnowBe4’s content library is the largest in this comparison.

Where does KnowBe4 fall short?

KnowBe4’s vishing, which arrived on 10 September 2026, is a different animal from its email product: Say, Play and Pause steps ending in a mandatory failure step that requires four to twenty keypad digits, with no speech recognition and no branching, gated to SAT Advanced or Diamond. As of September 2026, KnowBe4’s report catalog contains no vishing report and the Risk Score engine’s seven security types include no voice type, so voice behaviour does not reach the score that drives everything else. Brightside’s voice agent holds a live conversation and its results sit in the same risk picture as email. If you’re weighing the suite against alternatives, we’ve ranked ten KnowBe4 alternatives.

Best for

Organizations that want library breadth and compliance volume, with per-user orchestration of email simulations and training handled by agents.

6. SoSafe

SoSafe builds personalization on behavioural science and runs it at European scale, with the most complete public admin documentation of any vendor here. SoSafe holds 4.5 out of 5 on G2.

What does SoSafe do well?

SoSafe spreads training across the year in small doses rather than delivering it annually, with modules chosen by role and risk level, and sends roughly one simulated email per user per month with difficulty adjusting to individual performance. SoSafe lands a failing employee on a learning page that breaks down what they missed. SoSafe’s Human Risk OS pulls learning data, simulation results, threat reporting and risk scoring into one view, and its Sofie delivers bite-sized learning and instant interventions inside Microsoft Teams or Slack. SoSafe is the only vendor in this field shipping named standards modules, ISO Simulation Analytics and ISO E-Learning Analytics.

Where does SoSafe fall short?

SoSafe’s vishing takes place, in SoSafe’s own words, “entirely within the browser at the end of an e-learning lesson”, with no phone numbers collected, the learner supplying context first, and the use of AI disclosed before the call begins. That is a rehearsal rather than a deception test. SoSafe offers no voice cloning and publishes no voice-specific metric. Brightside places the call to the employee’s phone, unannounced, inside working hours, and grades the result alongside email. Our Brightside vs SoSafe comparison is written for EU buyers weighing the two.

Best for

Multilingual European workforces that want behaviour-science content at scale and ISO-named reporting, with voice as a lesson rather than a test.

7. Arsen

Arsen personalizes by role, adapts difficulty by behaviour, and places real outbound calls with a live agent, with the best public documentation of any voice product in this comparison. Arsen holds 4.8 out of 5 on G2.

What does Arsen do well?

Arsen calibrates training to function, risk profile and simulation history, so finance staff see different content from engineers, and ties simulation difficulty to individual behaviour. Arsen’s automation sequences assign a targeted micro-lesson automatically when an employee fails a phishing, vishing or deepfake simulation. Arsen’s vishing places a real outbound call with a live two-way agent, steered through a free-text Call Pretext plus First Phrase and End Phrase, with a Preview Call that dials a number you type in and a coordinated call-plus-email flow named “Phone to phish” running on one timeline. Arsen’s six-article vishing help centre names the actual UI fields.

Where does Arsen fall short?

Arsen’s voice cloning is managed rather than self-serve: the customer provides 30 to 60 seconds of audio plus consent proof and Arsen’s team processes it into Caller Profiles. Arsen steers its agent through a single free-text pretext field rather than discrete controls, and its difficulty field on vishing scenarios has no published scale behind it. Arsen documents Entra ID and Google Workspace sync, and rule-based dynamic group membership is not documented. Brightside clones a voice from a one to two minute recording and exposes influence techniques, tone and first message as separate controls.

Best for

French-market and European buyers who want a live-call vishing product with thorough documentation and don’t need to clone voices on their own.

8. Keepnet Labs

Keepnet Labs assembles a User Risk Score and turns it into learning paths automatically, with the strongest documentation in the field and the deepest multi-tenant story for resellers.

What does Keepnet Labs do well?

Keepnet builds its User Risk Score from clicks, reports and repeat offences, identifies repeat offenders and patterns of risky behaviour, and assigns adaptive learning paths automatically, with just-in-time microlearning after a risky action and nudges to reinforce good behaviour. Keepnet’s outcome-driven metrics push buyers toward repeat click rate, report rate, time to report, repeat offender reduction and risk trends by department, a more defensible set than completion percentages. Keepnet’s multi-tenant story covers reseller-only tenancy, white-labeling, per-tenant content scoping and a Reseller API with its own billing endpoints.

Where does Keepnet Labs fall short?

Keepnet sells three separate voice products on one marketing page. Keepnet’s documented self-serve Vishing Simulator runs at most five text-to-speech, MP3 or Pause steps advanced by keypad digits, where “vished” means reaching a step flagged as a failure step rather than anything the employee says. Keepnet’s Agentic AI Vishing Call Agent, a paid add-on announced in March 2026, is a genuine two-way agent with transcripts and summaries and has no documentation page. Keepnet’s Vishing as a Service is a managed engagement delivered by human callers and the only place Keepnet does voice cloning. Keepnet’s documentation states there is no send-test-now option. Brightside does all of that in one self-serve product, and an admin can hear the call before any employee does.

Best for

Managed service providers who need per-tenant separation and white-labeling, and buyers who want risk-driven learning paths and are content with keypad vishing or a managed engagement.

9. Infosec IQ

Infosec IQ personalizes by role across a very large library and is the only platform in this comparison whose risk layer is fed by production security telemetry. Infosec IQ holds 4.5 out of 5 on G2.

What does Infosec IQ do well?

Infosec IQ routes employees through admin-built learning paths across more than three thousand awareness and training resources, with microlearning and gamification. Infosec IQ’s human risk management layer ingests signals from SIEM, EDR, SOAR and DLP environments, so the score reflects what an employee did in production as well as in a drill. Infosec IQ’s phishing reporting integrations and LMS compatibility suit teams layering risk-based nudging onto an established awareness workflow.

Where does Infosec IQ fall short?

Infosec IQ documents its simulation difficulty as admin-set and “subjective and can be set to whatever you feel is appropriate”. Infosec IQ itself has no voice capability; voice exists only in Infosec HRM, a separately sold resale of Right-Hand Cybersecurity that publishes no documentation. Brightside grades email difficulty on the NIST Phish Scale and runs voice inside the same platform and the same risk picture.

Best for

Security teams that want to wire SIEM and EDR signals into who gets trained, on top of a large role-based library.

10. Jericho Security

Jericho Security generates pretexts with AI rather than picking from a library and offers the most frictionless evaluation on-ramp in the field.

What does Jericho Security do well?

Jericho Security says it feeds dark web data and real-world examples into hyper-personalized spear-phishing simulations, tracks performance to build personalized training paths, redirects a clicker straight into targeted training content, and can produce custom training material inside 24 hours. Jericho offers a seven-day free trial at Premium level with voice included, no credit card and no sales call.

Where does Jericho Security fall short?

Jericho’s documentation is where the picture thins. None of the twelve articles in Jericho’s support centre covers voice, and no campaign flow, steering surface, voice library, cloning mechanic or metric is published, so the voice capability is not documented. Jericho’s difficulty methodology is not documented. Brightside documents its voice campaign path publicly and grades email difficulty on a published scale.

Best for

Teams that want to trial personalized AI-generated phishing without a sales call, and can verify voice for themselves during the trial.

Which platform is best for your team?

Use case	Platform	Why
The attack matched to the person on email and phone	Brightside AI	Live adaptive calls and spear-phishing from one platform, with the same employee in both
A course the employee actually finishes	Brightside AI	Chat-based courses with branching interactions, and the failure lesson built on the exact lure
Enterprise reporting depth	Adaptive Security	More than fifty pre-built reports, narrative summaries, PowerPoint export
Sustained engagement in a large workforce	Hoxhunt	Adaptive cadence per user and gamified reporting
Already inside the Proofpoint ecosystem	Proofpoint ZenGuide	Adaptive Groups fed by threat, identity and DLP signals
Library breadth and compliance volume	KnowBe4	Largest library, agent-run orchestration per user
EU multilingual scale with ISO-named reporting	SoSafe	ISO Simulation Analytics and ISO E-Learning Analytics
French-market live-call vishing	Arsen	Real outbound calls, documented field by field
Managed service providers	Keepnet Labs	Reseller tenancy, white-labeling, Reseller API
Production telemetry in the risk score	Infosec IQ	SIEM, EDR, SOAR and DLP inputs
Trial without a sales call	Jericho Security	Seven-day Premium trial with voice included

For a broader field than this one, our 2026 breakdown of security awareness training platforms covers the generalist suites in more depth.

How Brightside differs from a platform that only personalizes the lure

Personalizing the attack is the easy half. Most of the market has invested in making the lure fit the person, and far less has gone into making the lesson fit the person, which is the layer the UC San Diego engagement data suggests is actually broken. When 37% to 51% of remedial training sessions last zero seconds, a better-targeted lure doesn’t fix the problem that nobody reads the follow-up. Brightside is built on the line that the teaching has to adapt too, and that the two halves belong in one product so the result of one feeds the other.

The attack fits the person, in their language, and never repeats

Brightside’s AI OSINT spear-phishing matches each employee’s attack to their role and context, so the marketer gets Meta Ads and the finance clerk gets an invoice, and translates it into the employee’s own language automatically. Brightside never sends the same attack to the same employee twice and runs a three-month sender-domain cooling period per employee, and delivery is staggered randomly inside working days and hours so colleagues can’t warn each other. Difficulty on every email template sits on the NIST Phish Scale.

The phone is a first-class channel

Brightside’s vishing agent holds a live conversation and adapts to what the employee says, across three attack types: Voice, Voice + BEC, and BEC. An admin defines the goal (a fraudulent invoice approval, a click on a 2FA phishing link), the caller persona with free-text context, up to three influence techniques, the tone, and the voice, or clone one from a one to two minute recording. Before anything reaches an employee, a test launch sends the admin the email, the call, or both, exactly as the target would receive them. The vishing simulator walkthrough shows the whole path.

The lesson lands at the moment of failure, built on the lure that worked

When an employee clicks, Brightside shows them the exact email that fooled them, with every red flag highlighted, immediately. The optional Realistic mode first runs a full-screen ransomware takeover with a countdown and a Pay Now button, so the consequence is felt before the lesson is read. There is no queue and no generic module to open later.

The course itself branches

Brightside’s courses, dozens of them, run as a chat guided by Brighty, an interactive learning companion, with information in short chunks, branching interactions that let learners explore choices and consequences, and quizzes, mini-games, audio and video placed where they serve the course’s goal. Each course is aligned to one of three goals, topic awareness, behaviour change, or compliance knowledge, and the learning design follows the methodology for that goal. Courses are versioned, so completion records always match what was taught.

The risk picture is honest

Brightside scores risk per employee and per group from simulation behaviour, course progress, and exposure factors including appearance in known data breaches, with the highest-risk people listed first, and a baseline option treats the first simulation round as the before-training benchmark. Scanner clicks are separated from human clicks by a hidden link only automated scanners follow, and historical figures reflect who was employed at the time, so headcount changes don’t rewrite last quarter. What an employee adds in their own Personal Portal is never visible to the employer, and the achievement system rewards progress with no punitive badge among its nine. For more on what belongs in a score, see our human risk scoring guide.

FAQ

What is adaptive security awareness training?

Brightside defines adaptive security awareness training as training where what an employee receives changes based on who they are and how they performed, and we build it in four layers: the simulated attack matched to the person, difficulty and cadence adjusted to their results, courses assigned from a risk score, and course content that changes as the learner moves through it. Most platforms build one or two of the four, and a buyer should ask which.

What is the difference between personalized and adaptive security awareness training?

Personalized usually means the content is chosen up front from what is known about the employee: their role, department, country. Adaptive usually means it keeps changing from what the employee does: their clicks, reports and course results. In practice vendors use the two words interchangeably, so the useful question is which of the four layers a platform actually implements rather than which adjective it prefers.

What’s the difference between role-based and behavioral personalization in security awareness training?

Role-based personalization routes an employee by their job function, so finance gets invoice fraud and engineering gets credential theft, and the frameworks that require tailored training are asking for this. Behavioural personalization routes them by what they did last time: a repeat clicker gets a faster cadence or a harder lure. Proofpoint’s Adaptive Groups do both from one rule set, Hoxhunt leads on the behavioural side, and Brightside’s dynamic groups ship with both kinds ready-made, including new hires from the last 90 days and employees with a high failure rate.

Does personalized phishing training work?

The honest answer is that nobody has proven it does. The UC San Diego Health trial found that the common deployed forms of training reduced failure rates by 1.7%, and no vendor has published an equivalent randomized trial of the adaptive alternative. The same trial found the lure choice moved failure rates from 1.8% to 30.8%, which is the strongest available argument for personalizing the attack, and found that most remedial training was never opened, which is the strongest argument for fixing the lesson.

Does training actually reduce phishing risk, or is it just a box to tick?

Annual modules and click-triggered generic training performed close to useless in the one large randomized trial, whose authors concluded that current deployed forms of training are “unlikely to offer significant practical value in reducing phishing risks.” Their recommendation was to lean on technical countermeasures like phishing-resistant authentication. Training that changes what the employee sees, and gets read, has not been tested the same way, so treat any vendor’s dashboard figure as a vendor figure and run your own baseline round before and after.

How often should a personalization profile be updated?

Continuously, and without a person doing it. A profile that updates when an admin edits a group is a profile that lags the moment the admin gets busy. Hoxhunt’s model updates on every click and report, Adaptive Security’s score updates continuously, and Brightside’s dynamic groups update themselves from employee data, with breach exposure re-checked monthly against known data breaches.

Does deeper personalization always mean more complexity to manage?

Brightside’s answer is no: the spear-phishing chooses the template for each employee, the dynamic groups update themselves, and the failure lesson fires on the click, so the admin’s job is to review results rather than to build the program by hand. Complexity shows up when the admin has to write the rules: which group, which template, which course. A platform that picks the attack, ships useful groups ready-made, and puts the lesson in front of the employee automatically removes most of that work.

If you want to see all four layers working on your own team, Brightside runs a free seven-day Pro proof of concept for ten seats.