What is the best security awareness platform?

There are many security awareness platforms on the market and that, far from making the decision easier, complicates it. When the options multiply, so do the doubts, and the comparison ends up being made on feature lists that barely tell one tool from another.

With this post I will try to help you choose the best security awareness platform for your organisation.

This post was published in August 2024 and reviewed in September 2026, with the criteria that separate one platform from another today.

There is no best platform, there is a best one for your organisation

First of all, we should be clear that the ideal platform for one organisation can be the worst decision for another.

What I mean is that “the best platform” does not exist as such in general terms. What does exist is the best platform for your organisation in particular.

To find it, you first need to define clearly what you want a security awareness platform for. The most common objectives are three:

• Managing social engineering risk
• Creating and sustaining a security culture
• Demonstrating compliance with internal and external regulations

Let us look at each objective and what you should bear in mind to meet it simply and effectively.

Start from the objective, not from the feature table

Managing social engineering risk

If one of your objectives is managing social engineering risk, you need to know your current risk level and then bring it down to an acceptable one.

To know your current risk level you have to simulate different kinds of attack and measure how people behave against each one. Phishing, ransomware, smishing, quishing and USB drop do not measure the same thing, because they do not arrive through the same channel and do not ask for the same action.

With that in mind, you need a platform that offers a wide range of social engineering simulation tools and that produces reliable results by detecting false positives.

That second point gets underestimated. If your email security filter opens the links before the person does, some of the clicks you are about to count were made by nobody, and any decision you take on that data will be flawed.

To bring risk down to an acceptable level you need awareness actions. The best option is a platform that centralises simulation and awareness, because management gets simpler and you get correlation reports that demonstrate the effectiveness of what you are doing.

One more piece is missing, the one that turns measurement into response: the action firing on its own. Ask whether the platform runs automatic actions when someone engages in risky behaviour, and whether those actions can also be triggered by what your security stack already detects, not only by what happens inside the platform itself. SMARTFENSE Playbooks have existed since release 4.17, and their triggers include six Microsoft Defender 365 events, such as a click on a malicious URL or the creation of a mail forwarding rule.

That question opens a broader one, which is how the platform connects to what you already have running. It is worth reviewing user synchronisation with your directory, content delivery in the tools where people already work, data going out over the API to the corporate dashboard, and LMS integration if the organisation’s training lives there. Every one of those connections that is missing becomes manual work someone will do every month, and it is better to count it before signing rather than after. The full list is in integrations.

Creating and sustaining a security culture

A security culture is not built with one campaign. It needs a continuous process, and that process depends on you having content that suits your audience and varied means of reaching it.

So check that the platform you choose has a quality content catalogue that is regionalised and fully customisable, and several awareness tools to reach your entire audience.

And speaking of engagement, it is practically mandatory that the platform adapts to the organisation’s style and lets you configure your own corporate sender address for every message that reaches people.

One step beyond the sender address sits the domain. Check whether the platform can run entirely under your organisation’s domain rather than a vendor subdomain, because that is what the person sees when they click, and it is the difference between a programme that looks like your own and one that looks outsourced. At SMARTFENSE the custom domain has been available since release 4.37, the organisation sets it up on its own from the interface, and the certificate is issued and renewed automatically.

Demonstrating compliance with internal and external regulations

Meeting a regulation can be very simple or extremely complicated. We all prefer the first, and for that you need a platform with:

• Audit records ready to hand over
• Protection for audit logs, covering both end users and administrators
• An automatic awareness programme
• Straightforward user and group management

If all of that comes inside a dedicated component for managing regulations, policies and procedures, even better.

That component rests on a mapping. When each piece of content is tied to the specific clauses it covers, you stop estimating your level of compliance and start reading it: what percentage of each regulation you have covered, and what each person did to get there. At SMARTFENSE the content ships mapped against clauses of the GDPR, ISO/IEC 27001 and the NIS 2 directive, among others, and the organisation can load its own regulations, policies and procedures and map them against its own content.

Ask to see the two reports that come out of it, coverage by regulation and coverage by user, because those are what you will put on the table when an auditor asks whether a specific person was informed and when.

Seven questions a demo answers and a brochure does not

Once the objective is clear, the comparison becomes manageable. These seven questions discriminate more than any feature list, because each one is verified in a real test and none of them is answered with a generic yes.

1. Does the programme manage courses or people? It reveals whether the number that closes the quarter measures training delivered or actual risk. Ask to see one specific person’s profile and the organisation-level indicator in the same session.

2. What happens after someone falls for it? It reveals whether the platform only assigns training or acts as well. Ask them to fire an automatic action in response to risky behaviour, in front of you.

3. Who runs the programme when nobody is dedicated to it? It reveals whether the programme survives a busy person or a holiday. Ask them to generate an annual plan from scratch and to download it for you before activating it.

4. Can the content be written in the organisation’s own voice? It reveals whether you can react to a case of your own this week or depend on the vendor’s catalogue. Ask to edit one piece of content and create a new one in the same session.

5. Do real incidents live in the same product? It reveals whether the email a person reports ends up in the programme’s inbox or in a shared mailbox. Ask to report a real email and follow it through to its classification.

6. Which channels does the simulation cover beyond email? It reveals whether you measure the whole risk or only the part that reaches the inbox. Ask for the list of channels and for a simulation outside email.

7. What evidence is left for an audit? It reveals whether you will export by hand or the record is already there. Ask for the report exactly as you would hand it to an auditor.

Courses or people

A course completion rate is an honest record that training was delivered. It closes a box. What it does not do is tell you who is at risk today, or whether the organisation is better off than six months ago. That step is taken by a per-person indicator that crosses what each one does when facing a simulation with the impact their mistake would have. We develop this in why a compliance percentage lies and in what human risk management actually means.

Who runs the programme

This is the most common constraint and the one that shuts most programmes down around month six. Ask how much of the year holds without intervention: whether the annual plan is generated from a configuration, whether audiences recalculate themselves when someone joins the organisation or crosses a risk threshold, and whether the operation can be delegated to the vendor when there is no internal team to sustain it. In our case, that degree of automation runs from a different path for each person without planning any of them to the annual programme generated from a simple configuration.

Where incidents live

When someone reports a genuinely suspicious email, somebody has to classify it, preserve it and leave a record. If that happens outside the platform, the habit that took so long to build fades for lack of response. You can see the full circuit in the journey of a reported email and in how a report gets triaged.

Three considerations almost nobody puts on the list

Proximity to the vendor

Something that is not always taken into account, but genuinely matters, is how close you are to the vendor.

If you can, look for a platform whose technical team is available to support you in your own time zone and language. Having a direct contact completely changes how long it takes you to resolve any difficulty.

Believe me, you do not want to be in the middle of a problem, going through several automated filters and waiting hours or days to finally talk to a person, and in another language on top of that.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is everywhere today. In many cases it was forced in, by marketing. Saying you use artificial intelligence or machine learning makes you look better and more attractive.

Be careful with this. Think objectively about what each automation would be good for, given the objectives you defined. A good test is to ask them to show you what the system decides on its own and what a person still decides. If nobody can answer that, the label is probably sitting on top of a feature that already existed.

Look for automation and assistance, but in the right measure. Remember that you are dealing with people, working towards safe habits, and you are doing all of this on behalf of your own security team.

Track record and first-party data

A product that has existed for two years and one that has spent a decade measuring behaviour can have the same feature list. The difference shows up in what each one can show you of its own past.

Ask for two things. The first is the dated release notes, which anyone can count without asking permission: they tell you whether the product ships steadily or whether there were thin years, and at what real pace whatever they are promising you for next year actually lands. The second is the aggregated data the vendor publishes about its own base, with the methodology in plain sight. A report with a declared sample, a time window and filtering criteria is hard to improvise, because you need years of measuring to have one.

Neither of the two guarantees the platform is the right one for you, but both tell you how much of what you are being told already happened and how much is still a plan.

Final thoughts

I hope this post clarifies what to bear in mind when selecting a security awareness platform.

Remember that what matters most is meeting your objectives comfortably and effectively. So do not rely too heavily on generic comparisons or reports: look for what is best for your organisation, and verify it in a real test before signing.

If you want to structure the evaluation step by step, in how to choose your security awareness platform we develop the same path in the format of a decision framework.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best security awareness platform?

There is no single best platform for every organisation. The ideal platform for one can be the worst decision for another, because what changes is the objective. Before comparing tools, define whether the goal is managing social engineering risk, sustaining a security culture or demonstrating regulatory compliance. Each of those objectives demands different features, and the right platform is the one that meets yours with the team and the budget you actually have.

What criteria should I use to choose a security awareness platform?

Seven criteria order the evaluation better than a feature table: what the programme manages, courses or people; what happens after someone falls for a simulation; who runs the programme when nobody is dedicated to it; whether content can be written in the organisation’s own voice; whether real incidents live inside the same product; which channels the simulation covers beyond email; and what evidence is left for an audit. All seven can be answered in a demo.

Why is a course completion rate not enough as an indicator?

Because it measures training activity, not risk. A high completion rate is a valid record that training was delivered, and it closes an audit box. It does not tell you who is at risk today or whether the organisation is better off than six months ago. That requires a per-person indicator combining what each person does when facing a simulation with the impact their mistake would have.

What happens if nobody is dedicated to running the programme?

This is the most common constraint and the one that shuts most programmes down around month six. Ask about the real degree of automation: whether the platform generates the annual plan from a configuration, whether audiences recalculate themselves when someone joins the organisation or crosses a risk threshold, and whether the operation can be delegated to the vendor or its partner. A programme that depends on someone pushing it every month stops when that person goes on holiday.