CISO Tribune

Vendor comparison · 2 companies

Apiiro vs KnowBe4

Apiiro offers Guardian Agent, which protects coding agents, prevents risk and AutoFixes backlogs, powered by the Apiiro Context Graph. KnowBe4 sells attack simulation and training, email and collaboration security, and agent security through the KnowBe4 Platform. CISO Tribune files both under AI model and agent security. This page sets the two records side by side: what each sells, where it is based, who owns and funds it, the customers it names and its recent news, each fact numbered to its source.

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  • Apiiro
  • KnowBe4
Apiiro vs KnowBe4: Products, Customers and Funding Compared
ApiiroApiiro offers Guardian Agent, which protects coding agents, prevents risk and AutoFixes backlogs, powered by the Apiiro Context Graph.apiiro.comKnowBe4KnowBe4 sells attack simulation and training, email and collaboration security, and agent security through the KnowBe4 Platform.knowbe4.com
What it sells
  • AI-SAST[9]Static analysis that uses context from the customer's software graph and business risk to detect vulnerabilities.
  • AI-SCA[10]Open source security that moves from CVE matching to risk validation and fix.
  • Security Awareness Training[4][5][7]Education on recognizing threats, reinforced with phishing and vishing simulations.
  • Cloud Email Security[10]A suite of AI-driven products for inbound and outbound email.
  • Defend[1][4][5][6][10][11]Inbound email protection against phishing, ransomware and business email compromise.
  • Prevent[5][10][12]Outbound email protection and data loss prevention.
  • Compliance Plus[13]Compliance training platform.
  • Student Edition[5]Security awareness training for academic institutions.
  • BreachSim[14]A free tool to identify network vulnerabilities.
  • Weak Password Test[15]A free tool that finds users with weak passwords.
Categories
Headquarters
Not stated on its pagesClearwater, United States
Founded
Not stated on its pages2010[1]
Ownership and funding
Not stated on its pagesOwned by Vista Equity Partners since 2023[2][4][8][9]
Named customers
Not stated on its pagesNot stated on its pages
Recent news
Not stated on its pages
  • May 5, 2026KnowBe4 launched a two-tier Security Awareness Training offering and a new AI defense agent for custom content creation.[7]
  • April 6, 2026Dashlane announced an integration with KnowBe4 that links credential risk detection to security training for at-risk users.[18]
G2 and Gartner Peer Insights
  • G2: listed, seen November 10, 2026[15]
  • Gartner Peer Insights: Not stated on its pages
  • G2: listed, seen November 4, 2026[8]
  • Gartner Peer Insights: listed, seen November 4, 2026[9]
Who it fits
From its own pages, Apiiro presents Guardian Agent as delivering outcomes for CISOs and CTOs. In our reading, the Apiiro Context Graph is aimed at application security, development and compliance teams working alongside coding agents. Apiiro gives maintainers free AutoFix.Not written yet
Last verified
November 3, 2026September 27, 2026

Where they overlap

  • Apiiro and KnowBe4 are both filed under AI model and agent security.

Where they differ, field by field

  • Apiiro's primary category is Application security posture management; KnowBe4's is Security awareness training.
  • Apiiro is also filed under Software composition analysis and Software supply chain security. KnowBe4 is also filed under Human risk management and Email security.
  • Apiiro lists AI-SAST and AI-SCA. KnowBe4 lists Security Awareness Training, Cloud Email Security, Defend, Prevent, Compliance Plus and 3 more.
  • KnowBe4 is headquartered in Clearwater, United States.
  • KnowBe4 was founded in 2010.
  • KnowBe4 is owned by Vista Equity Partners, since 2023.

What it sells: Apiiro

What AI-SAST does[9]
AI-SAST shifts static analysis from a detection problem to a risk validation and fix problem. AI-powered SAST uses context from the customer's software graph and business risk to detect vulnerabilities, validate true positives and identify false positives. Deep Code Analysis builds the Software Graph across files, code modules, repositories and code owners, updated on every commit.
What AI-SCA does[10]
AI-SCA shifts open source security from CVE matching to risk validation and fix. Contextual analysis decides whether a vulnerability is used in code, internet exposed and exploitable. Malicious packages, license conflicts and AI components are covered beyond CVEs. Dependency scanning reaches the leaf node, covering direct, transitive and custom-built internal dependencies.

What it sells: KnowBe4

What Security Awareness Training does[4][5][7]
KnowBe4 says it delivers timely, personalized education that helps people recognize threats. Lessons are reinforced with realistic phishing and vishing simulations.
What Cloud Email Security does[10]
KnowBe4 Cloud Email Security is a suite of AI-driven products designed to detect and prevent advanced email threats across inbound and outbound communication. Contextual banners and prompts are delivered at the point of risk.
What Defend does[1][4][5][6][10][11]
Defend detects and blocks phishing, ransomware and business email compromise with behavioral AI and self-learning threat models. Defend inserts color-coded banners on flagged email and rewrites links, checking them at time of click. Defend integrates with Microsoft Defender for Office 365 through API-based connectivity.
What Prevent does[5][10][12]
Prevent monitors outbound email in real time and alerts users to risky behavior, such as accidental sends or misdirected emails. Prevent is integrated with Microsoft Outlook and Office 365. Prevent Enterprise adds misdirected content detection and custom DLP policies.
What Compliance Plus does[13]
Compliance Plus has a training library of 1000+ items of compliance training content. Compliance Plus offers targeted training for requirements such as HIPAA, PCI and GDPR. Organizations can upload SCORM-compliant content to the KnowBe4 LMS.
What Student Edition does[5]
The KnowBe4 Student Edition enables academic institutions to prepare students to identify and prevent modern cyberattacks. Its training content covers phishing, BYOD risks, password hygiene, social media risks and campus scams.
What BreachSim does[14]
BreachSim is a free tool from KnowBe4 to identify network vulnerabilities. BreachSim tests over 12 realistic data exfiltration scenarios following the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
What Weak Password Test does[15]
The Weak Password Test is a free tool to help IT Administrators know which users have passwords that are easily guessed. It checks the Active Directory and generates a report of users with weak passwords.

Questions about Apiiro and KnowBe4

What do Apiiro and KnowBe4 sell?
Apiiro sells AI-SAST and AI-SCA. KnowBe4 sells Security Awareness Training, Cloud Email Security, Defend, Prevent, Compliance Plus and 3 more.
Are Apiiro and KnowBe4 in the same category?
They share AI model and agent security. Apiiro's primary category is Application security posture management and KnowBe4's is Security awareness training.
Where are Apiiro and KnowBe4 headquartered?
KnowBe4 is headquartered in Clearwater, United States.
When were Apiiro and KnowBe4 founded?
KnowBe4 was founded in 2010.
Who owns Apiiro and KnowBe4?
KnowBe4 is owned by Vista Equity Partners, since 2023.
Who are Apiiro and KnowBe4 sold to?
From its own pages, Apiiro presents Guardian Agent as delivering outcomes for CISOs and CTOs.
What have Apiiro and KnowBe4 announced recently?
May 5, 2026: KnowBe4 launched a two-tier Security Awareness Training offering and a new AI defense agent for custom content creation.

About Apiiro

Apiiro offers Guardian Agent, which protects coding agents, prevents risk and AutoFixes backlogs, powered by the Apiiro Context Graph. Apiiro describes agentic development as a setting where code is written by agents, risk appears at machine speed, and offensive agents exploit vulnerabilities in seconds. Guardian Agent delivers three outcomes for CISOs and CTOs by executing actions and measuring success. On compliance, Apiiro provides automated evidence collection and policy enforcement for every feature and code change.[1][3][4][5]

Guardian Agent actions run on the AppSec Context Graph, made up of a Software Graph and a Risk Graph, which gives every action the context of policies and software architecture from prompt to code to runtime. Patented Deep Code Analysis (DCA) and code-to-runtime matching continuously map each customer's evolving software architecture, including APIs, AI assets, PII, OSS, internal packages and their material changes. Apiiro correlates code to runtime to trace exposure paths and reachability. Apiiro governs every tool and change, human or agent, with one policy and risk engine.[2][3][4]

Apiiro discovers, inventories and catalogs AI models, agents, MCP servers, AI datasets, 3rd-party services and everything inside codebases. Apiiro discovers and inventories the AI tools that developers and coding agents use, including IDEs, extensions, skills, plugins and MCP servers. Apiiro discovers, inventories and tracks open-source dependencies, licenses, end-of-life status, versions and vulnerabilities, and where they are used across the software architecture graph. Apiiro discovers, inventories and assesses cryptographic usage in code, including encryption, hashing, keys, secrets, certificates, algorithms and KMS implementation. Apiiro discovers, inventories and maps CI/CD pipelines, build systems, artifacts, registries, deployment flows and the software delivery paths from code to runtime. Apiiro's policy and risk engine is an open, graph-based risk engine that correlates findings from 1st/3rd-party tools, maps them to the software graph, detects toxic combinations and blast radius, and prioritizes business-specific risk. Apiiro assesses AI usage risks across code and the software supply chain, including dependencies, models, coding agents, MCP servers, skills and extensions. Apiiro continuously ingests, assesses, manages and tracks Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) across codebases, the software supply chain (OSS) and 3rd-party applications.[1][7]

Autonomous monitoring detects new feature tickets in Jira, GitHub and Azure DevOps and triggers threat analysis with no human in the loop.[8]

AI-SAST shifts static analysis from a detection problem to a risk validation and fix problem. Deep Code Analysis (DCA) continuously builds a Software Graph of the software architecture across files, code modules, repositories and code owners, updated on every commit and material change. AI-SCA shifts open source security from CVE matching to risk validation and fix. Apiiro continuously detects vulnerable and malicious OSS components and risky licenses using AI-powered context from the customer's software graph and business risk. Dependency scanning runs to the leaf node, covering direct, transitive and custom-built internal dependencies. Open source coverage extends beyond CVEs to malicious packages, license conflicts and AI components.[5][6][7][9][10][12]

Apiiro detects secrets in code, history, documentation and pipelines. Apiiro surfaces secrets deleted from the codebase that remain in every branch and revision of Git history. Apiiro checks every detected secret against the issuing platform, marking it valid, invalid or revoked. Guardrails block valid secrets at the pull request, before deployment. Apiiro inventories AI agents, MCP servers, GenAI frameworks, models, datasets and AI-related secrets from code on every commit. Apiiro blocks unapproved frameworks and models at the pull request. Apiiro generates audit-ready evidence for the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001 from code.[11][12]

Apiiro maps packages, skills and plugins to their repositories, coding agents, pipelines and running containers. Apiiro's Dependency Firewall scans open-source code using Deep Code Analysis to detect and block malicious packages before installation. Apiiro inspects packages downloaded by coding agents, locally and in the cloud, across operating systems. Package policies control installations based on malware, backdoors, vulnerabilities and application risk.[13]

AutoFix takes findings from Apiiro's own scanners, 3rd-party scanners and frontier model scans, and fixes them across the attack surface. Apiiro generates each fix in the context of the software architecture graph and organizational policies, and runs tests to prove nothing breaks. Apiiro reflects Chainguard's remediation state directly in Risk Graph, so findings Chainguard has already fixed stop showing as open. Apiiro AutoFixes OSS in first-party code based on risk and gives maintainers free AutoFix to accelerate community fixes.[1][2][3][5][6][7][8][9][10][14]

Apiiro on the record

Sources

Apiiro full record

  1. [1]apiiro.comApiiro · apiiro.com · undated page, accessed November 3, 2026 · Tier A
  2. [2]Apiiro named the most innovative aspm provider worldwide byfrostsullivansApiiro · apiiro.com · published December 9, 2025 · Tier A
  3. [3]Apiiro Context Graph: How it Works, Benefits, Use Cases | ApiiroApiiro · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  4. [4]Guardian Agent: Application Security Posture Management to action | ApiiroApiiro · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  5. [5]Guardian Agent: Secure agentic development | ApiiroApiiro · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  6. [6]Free AutoFix for open source maintainers | ApiiroApiiro · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  7. [7]Apiiro: Secure your agentic developmentApiiro · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  8. [8]Guardian Agent: AI Threat Modeling, Secure by Design | ApiiroApiiro · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  9. [9]AI-SAST: Static scanning reimagined | ApiiroApiiro · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  10. [10]AI-SCA: Open source security reimagined | ApiiroApiiro · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  11. [11]Secrets Security: Detect, validate, fix | ApiiroApiiro · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  12. [12]AI-SPM: Discover & govern every AI asset | ApiiroApiiro · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  13. [13]Guardian Agent: Protect from Software Supply Chain Attacks | ApiiroApiiro · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  14. [14]Guardian Agent: AutoFix SAST, SCA, Secrets, API, Containers | ApiiroApiiro · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  15. [15]Apiiro Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & FeaturesG2 · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier C

KnowBe4 full record

  1. [1]About usKnowBe4 · knowbe4.com · undated page, accessed September 27, 2026 · Tier A
  2. [2]Vista equity partners completes acquisition of knowbe4KnowBe4 · knowbe4.com · published February 1, 2023 · Tier A
  3. [3]Contact usKnowBe4 · knowbe4.com · undated page, accessed September 27, 2026 · Tier A
  4. [4]KnowBe4 | Secure Your Digital Workforce: Human + AIKnowBe4 · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  5. [5]KnowBe4 Student Edition | KnowBe4KnowBe4 · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  6. [6]Warning: Attackers Are Using Calendar Invite Files to Evade Security FiltersKnowBe4 · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  7. [7]KnowBe4 Launches AI-Native Attack Simulation & Training Product and Twelfth AI AgentBusiness Wire · published May 5, 2026 · Tier A
  8. [8]KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training Reviews 2026 - G2G2 · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier C
  9. [9]KnowBe4 Reviews, Ratings & Features 2026 | Gartner Peer InsightsGartner Peer Insights · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier C
  10. [10]Cloud Email Security for Microsoft 365 | KnowBe4KnowBe4 · undated page, accessed November 4, 2026 · Tier A
  11. [11]Pricing | DefendKnowBe4 · undated page, accessed November 4, 2026 · Tier A
  12. [12]Pricing | Prevent | KnowBe4KnowBe4 · undated page, accessed November 4, 2026 · Tier A
  13. [13]Compliance Plus: Compliance Training Platform | KnowBe4KnowBe4 · undated page, accessed November 4, 2026 · Tier A
  14. [14]BreachSim | KnowBe4KnowBe4 · undated page, accessed November 4, 2026 · Tier A
  15. [15]Weak Password Test | KnowBe4KnowBe4 · undated page, accessed November 4, 2026 · Tier A
  16. [16]Security Culture Report Analysis Center | KnowBe4KnowBe4 · undated page, accessed November 4, 2026 · Tier A
  17. [17]KnowBe4 Customer Success | KnowBe4KnowBe4 · undated page, accessed November 4, 2026 · Tier A
  18. [18]Dashlane Launches First-of-its-Kind Integration with KnowBe4 to Transform Security Awareness into Proactive DefensePR Newswire · published April 6, 2026 · Tier A

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