KnowBe4: keeping your employees in the know and putting your mind at ease.
Updated July 08, 2022

KnowBe4: keeping your employees in the know and putting your mind at ease.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training

This is being deployed throughout the whole company. To all departments and all branch locations. It helps us, the IT guys, so that we can continue to work on other tasks in IT while supplying spam awareness training to employees throughout the organization. There are different levels of types of phishing emails that you can pick from. Ranging from intermediate to extremely hard. They also give you email templates that give you options of what type of phishing emails get sent, which get updated frequently. It keeps track of who clicks links, opens attachments, invokes macros, replies, and more.

Pros

  • Raising awareness of phishing for end users.
  • Setup is really easy from implementation to running campaigns.
  • Training: videos are included.
  • Automating for less hassle.
  • Multiple reports and trends tracking.

Cons

  • Wish that it could be more granular with user options.
  • I wish there was an easier way to add users to groups automatically with AD sync. I ended up having to create a Powershell script to add users to AD Security Groups. This is what KnowBe4 uses to add AD users into KnowBe4 groups. This helps a lot when people come and go from the company and not having group memberships missed in the process.
  • AD sync makes it hard to remove certain users from groups if you have the groups automated. Especially if you have a one off person that you need to have excluded from getting phishing emails.
  • We have been able to train end users and save time for other tasks at the same time.
  • I can't even imagine the amount we have probably saved from avoided hacks and phishing attempts that could have gone wrong.
  • Saved us money/time not having to implement and design a phishing/safety training "in-house"
  • Several people now know what a "Fake Login Screen" will look like. This has saved many possible hacked accounts, which in return saves the IT department time.
  • Ex. Marketing time for drafting an apologetic email to customers for the senders "hacked account", The user not having to reply to calls and emails after having 100's of emails being sent from their hacked email account without knowing, and saves just overall time for everyone which time wasted = money wasted. As you can tell this has happened before and can be quite a hassle especially when it comes to time wasted.
You can go to other companies that design and code their own phishing software for companies But KnowBe4 does it right. There are not many companies that I know of that offer a cloud program/software like this for phishing training. They have different tiers and you can choose how many users you want in the program to change the annual costs.

Do you think KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training's feature set?

Yes

Did KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training again?

Yes

The emails you send go off of templates that are tested in house by the KnowB4 Engineers. The KnowB4 Engineers create emails and test them in-house on their own employees. The emails that get the most clicks, reply's and so on turn into templates available to all KnowB4 customers. They constantly send you fresh phishing and security related news events that you can relay to your end users. Also have many training videos and are update regularly to stay relevant.
At least at the time, it may have changed since. You are able to set up AD sync that will sync AD Users and AD Groups that you choose via a config file. You can point KnowBe4 sync to certain OU's and it will pull only those that have security groups that are also synced to KnowBe4 cloud. The only thing I had to do was automate; I created a powershell script. If a person was in a certain AD OU, then they would get a Security Group that correlates with that specific OU. The name of the AD security groups are the group names that will appear in KnowBe4 Cloud Admin. Every night, new AD users we create that day will automatically be added to the security groups, just in case they are missed on set up. Then they sync right to KnowBe4. We don't even have to worry about it.
The biggest for me and management is the clickers groups. Being able to see the trend from start to current of how many clickers we have dropped. It can report on replied emails, Invoked Macros, and others but reply and clicks is what our leadership likes to see the most. I will say from the beginning we have gone down over 75% in clicks, which is an awesome feeling as an IT Engineer.
I feel every company should use KnowB4 for at least a year. Just to keep end-users aware of what phishing looks like and what it can do. I have seen many dummy sites that have fake email logins (Office 365, Gmail mostly). The user logs into the site and steals the end user's credentials they enter in. Then the hacker has complete control of the end-users mailbox and sometimes goes unseen until unusual activity is seen. I would highly recommend KnowB4! They are good at what they do and you are easily able to simulate different types of phishing scenarios. This helps when you need to mold your phishing style towards what is relevant for your company or public trends.

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training Feature Ratings

Training Content Library
9
Multilingual Training Content
Not Rated
Training Gamification
Not Rated
Industry-Specific Security Training
9
Individualized Security Training Plans
9
Phishing Simulations
5
Security Reporting
9
Integration with Security Tech Stack
5
Role-based user permissions
10

KnowBe4 Compliance Plus

They have different options with length of videos or interactive emails that can show you where to look to identify a phishing email. We have not gone through all the videos but the ones I have seen are really good and very informative.
It was nice to be able to track progress and make sure that our employees are actually following through with the training. Since we are paying for it, we want to make sure people are doing the trainings.
yes
Although it can be pretty pricey, the end result of seeing users learn and not click on phishing emails almost just pays for itself.
We have not sought out other platforms and the only one that we have found were in house built programs. The in house built programs seemed okay but we wanted something that we could run ourselves and not have to worry about.

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training New Features

At least at the time, it may have changed since. You are able to set up AD sync that will sync AD Users and AD Groups that you choose via a config file. You can point KnowBe4 sync to certain OU's and it will pull only those that have security groups that are also synced to KnowBe4 cloud. The only thing I had to do was automate; I created a powershell script. If a person was in a certain AD OU, then they would get a Security Group that correlates with that specific OU. The name of the AD security groups are the group names that will appear in KnowBe4 Cloud Admin. Every night, new AD users we create that day will automatically be added to the security groups, just in case they are missed on set up. Then they sync right to KnowBe4. We don't even have to worry about it.
We have not used this feature yet but we are planning to test it out soon.
The interface is very intuitive. There is a little bit of training to make sure the settings are set how you would like them. But it is pretty easy to pick up and navigate on your own.
We do not use this function of KnowBe4

Using KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training

499 - This is the entire company so all functions.
3 - Basic knowledge of what a phishing email looks like so you can help explain what to look for when an end user asks. Other than that, the setup for making the Phishing and Training Campaigns is pretty easy. You just have to decide what content and what schedule.
  • Train users to not enter in information into fake sites
  • How to determine if an email is real or fake
  • What to do when you see a phishing email.
  • We have had competitions for the groups that have the least amount of clicks.
  • We use the metrics and send to the whole company security updates.
  • Do a simulated attack on the company to see how the org reacts.
We have seen huge results and feel this software has almost become a staple of getting security information out to the company.

Evaluating KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
We wanted users to have training on phishing emails. They claimed that they could drop our clicks by a certain percentage and it really did work.
Probably would do it the same way. There really isn't a whole lot we could have done differently.

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training Implementation

The implementation went really well and KnowBe4 was there the whole time on setup to make sure things were setup correctly. The only thing we had to figure out on our own was to script users automatically being added to security groups. So that when they sync to knowBe4 from AD they are placed into the same/correct groups.
Change management was minimal
  • Setting up Active Directory to sync users from OU's but automate users being added/removed from Security groups.

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training Training

The appointed support rep/trainer did very well to explain things and answer my questions.
The trainer was very knowledgeable, good at explaining features and answering questions I had.

Configuring KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training

I think for what it is doing, it is the right amount of configurability.
I think it worked really well by scripting users based on what OU they were in to become a member of a certain group. That way when AD syncs to Knowbe4, then they are automatically placed in the right groups and you don't have to worry about users are in the correct knowBe4 groups. Of course only if this make sense for your AD environment, I would recommend it.
No - there is no facility to customize the interface
No - the product does not support adding custom code
Not other than what I mentioned before about the PowerShell Script adding users to security groups based on their OU placement.

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Our subscription comes with support and not sure if they have a bundle that does not come with support. Which is great because they really do have good support and sales.
Yes - We had it were all our emails from our campaign (About 600 Emails) bounced and were not delivered to the recipients. I sent an email to our appointed support rep. Was fixed in about 20 minutes. Very happy with their response times and good support reps.
They supplied is with great support every time we call. But the issue that I just mentioned with all our emails bouncing to our recipients for the Campaign was the biggest one. We just had someone who's account was hacked and we needed a campaign to run to try and prevent others from doing the same thing. I called out support rep and she had the solution right away and gave me the option to just have the steps to fix it myself. She offered to do it but since it was in our Exchange server where the settings needed to change, I just opted to do it myself. After troubleshooting, calling support rep, and implementing the changes, we were back up and running in 20 minutes. Which is awesome in my eyes! I really do love their support!
They help you every step of the way. They will either help set up the software or if you are like me, sit back and let me do the install how I wanted. They give you training on the software after the install and have very timely responses to issues when calling into support. Even though since setup I only had to call support once in 2 years.

Using KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Setting up Phishing Campaigns
  • Setting up Training Campaigns
  • Picking templates to send
  • There really wasn't anything that was difficult

KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training Reliability

It is available anywhere there is internet access.
We have been using this for over 4 years and have never experienced an outage.
Speeds are great for page loading. So really depends on your internet access speeds where you are.

Integrating KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training

We have not had to or have had to look into integrating anything yet.
  • No attempts yet
Have not integrated anything yet.
  • We do not plan on any at the moment.
Not sure.
No that I know of.
No experience, so advice to give.

Relationship with KnowBe4

They were very nice, understanding, not pushing a ton to make a sale.
They were there from the beginning and have really good support through n through
We were able to talk price down a little because to start it was a little pricey.
Not really, they are pretty easy to deal with and very helpful.

Upgrading KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training

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