CISO Tribune

Vendor comparison · 2 companies

Immersive vs KnowBe4

Immersive sells Immersive One, which tests how people, AI-enabled workflows, security teams, and agents perform under pressure. KnowBe4 sells attack simulation and training, email and collaboration security, and agent security through the KnowBe4 Platform. CISO Tribune files both under Security awareness training and Human risk management. 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.

Change the companies

Up to four companies side by side.

  • Immersive
  • KnowBe4
Immersive vs KnowBe4: Products, Customers and Funding Compared
ImmersiveImmersive sells Immersive One, which tests how people, AI-enabled workflows, security teams, and agents perform under pressure.immersivelabs.comKnowBe4KnowBe4 sells attack simulation and training, email and collaboration security, and agent security through the KnowBe4 Platform.knowbe4.com
What it sells
  • Immersive One[3][4][5][9][12]Immersive One tests how people, AI-enabled workflows, security teams, and agents perform under pressure.
  • Hands-On Labs[6][10]Browser-based environments where an individual completes a real security task against live systems and tooling.
  • Cyber Drills[3][7][13]Cyber Drills recreate real incidents across people, process, and technology.
  • Cyber Range Exercises[7]Cyber Range Exercises are typically run with technical and SOC teams.
  • Resilience Pathways[10]A Resilience Pathway is a structured, role-based development journey that maps current capability to the skills a role requires.
  • AI Knowledge Pass[2][10]AI Knowledge Pass validates a person's AI-related knowledge before they're granted access to AI tools.
  • Resilience Score[3][6]Resilience Score quantifies an organization's ability to detect, respond to, and recover from cyber threats.
  • 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[14]
  • 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
Financial services organizations are addressed directly, with a focus on proving cyber readiness to Boards, C-level executives, and regulators. Application security programs aimed at developers who need to prove and improve secure coding skills form a further audience. Access to capabilities depends on the customer's agreed scope and deployment model.Not written yet
Last verified
November 8, 2026September 27, 2026

Where they overlap

  • Security awareness training is the primary category of both Immersive and KnowBe4; both are also filed under Human risk management.

Where they differ, field by field

  • Immersive is also filed under AI governance. KnowBe4 is also filed under Email security and AI model and agent security.
  • Immersive lists Immersive One, Hands-On Labs, Cyber Drills, Cyber Range Exercises, Resilience Pathways and 2 more. 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.

How they differ

CISO Tribune files both Immersive and KnowBe4 under Security awareness training as the primary category, and also under Human risk management. Immersive sells Immersive One, which covers labs, simulations, AI readiness and reporting, and tests how people, AI-enabled workflows, security teams and agents perform under pressure. KnowBe4 sells Security Awareness Training, which pairs education on recognizing threats with phishing and vishing simulations.

The offerings overlap in awareness and human risk work, but KnowBe4 adds email products, including Defend for inbound email and Prevent for outbound email and data loss prevention. Immersive addresses financial services organizations directly, along with application security programs for developers. Among KnowBe4's named customers are Hood College and Bridgewater State University.

KnowBe4 is headquartered in Clearwater, United States, was founded in 2010, and has been owned by Vista Equity Partners since 2023. On May 5, 2026, KnowBe4 launched a two-tier Security Awareness Training offering and a new AI defense agent for custom content creation. On April 6, 2026, Dashlane announced an integration with KnowBe4 that links credential risk detection to security training for at-risk users.

What it sells: Immersive

What Immersive One does[3][4][5][9][12]
Immersive One covers labs, simulations, AI readiness, and reporting. Access is determined by the customer’s agreed scope and deployment model.
What Cyber Drills does[3][7][13]
A Cyber Drill exercise is a simulated cyber attack that tests an organization's ability to detect, respond to, and recover from threats. Cyber Drills extend to business functions such as legal and comms.
What AI Knowledge Pass does[2][10]
AI Knowledge Pass connects access to proven competency rather than a one-time policy acknowledgment. It supports governance and compliance reporting as AI adoption scales.
What Resilience Score does[3][6]
Immersive's Resilience Score combines nine measured factors into a single value benchmarked against industry peers. The score is powered by up-to-date performance data from across the Immersive One platform.

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 Immersive and KnowBe4

What do Immersive and KnowBe4 sell?
Immersive sells Immersive One, Hands-On Labs, Cyber Drills, Cyber Range Exercises, Resilience Pathways and 2 more. KnowBe4 sells Security Awareness Training, Cloud Email Security, Defend, Prevent, Compliance Plus and 3 more.
Are Immersive and KnowBe4 in the same category?
Yes. Security awareness training is the primary category of both on CISO Tribune.
Where are Immersive and KnowBe4 headquartered?
KnowBe4 is headquartered in Clearwater, United States.
When were Immersive and KnowBe4 founded?
KnowBe4 was founded in 2010.
Who owns Immersive and KnowBe4?
KnowBe4 is owned by Vista Equity Partners, since 2023.
Who are Immersive and KnowBe4 sold to?
Financial services organizations are addressed directly, with a focus on proving cyber readiness to Boards, C-level executives, and regulators.
What have Immersive 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 Immersive

Immersive sells Immersive One, which tests how people, AI-enabled workflows, security teams, and agents perform under pressure. Immersive One turns AI-era cyber readiness into evidence. Immersive One shows where risk is changing and where capability must improve. The Immersive One Platform provides realistic simulations and hands-on cybersecurity labs to evaluate individual and team capabilities across the entire workforce. Immersive One Cyber Drills recreate real incidents across people, process, and technology. Immersive unifies labs, ranges, simulations, agent harnesses and reporting in a loop that runs continuously: Prove, Improve, Benchmark, Report. Access to Immersive One capabilities is determined by the customer’s agreed scope and deployment model.[3][4][5]

Immersive supports creating, tailoring and routing practical learning experiences that build cyber and AI readiness. Immersive provides realistic scenarios for rehearsing technical, operational, workforce, supply-chain, and crisis response. Immersive validates safe AI adoption, AI-assisted development, AI red-team activity, and agent behavior before production use. Immersive turns activity, assessment, pathway, and exercise evidence into readiness insight for teams. Immersive uses live-fire environments to test people, workflows and agents against real adversary behavior. Every run is scored against the customer's peers, the customer's history, and a baseline of humans versus agents. Immersive generates evidence from the same system that ran the test.[5][7]

A hands-on cybersecurity lab from Immersive is a browser-based environment where an individual completes a real security task against live systems and tooling. Immersive supports self-paced journeys for SOC, AppSec, CloudSec, AI, OT, OffSec, and wider workforce roles. The Immersive threat research team publishes hands-on content in response to emerging vulnerabilities and active campaigns. Immersive lets customers build and customize practical labs around proprietary code, emerging threats, and organization-specific security requirements. Immersive trains technical and non-technical teams to identify AI-specific risks and practice secure use and secure build workflows. Immersive lets customers test configurable AI analyst archetypes against realistic SIEM data and security workflows before allowing them to operate in production environments.[6][7]

A cyber range is a virtual environment designed to simulate real-world cyber threats, allowing individuals and teams to practice cybersecurity skills, test defenses, and improve incident response. A Cyber Drill exercise is a simulated cyber attack that tests an organization's ability to detect, respond to, and recover from threats. Cyber Range Exercises and Dynamic Threat Range are typically run with technical and SOC teams, and Cyber Drills extend to business functions such as legal and comms. Offensive AI Ranges and Developer AI Ranges benchmark model performance against attack scenarios and MITRE ATT&CK/ATLAS coverage, and validate whether AI-assisted development introduces security risk.[7]

Immersive exercises people through scenarios in which they interact with AI threat actors and dynamic social, chat, and video feeds. Immersive builds realistic crisis simulations around an organization using its systems, playbooks, risks, and threats. Business risk exercising is the practice of measuring and reducing the risk an organization's people introduce. Immersive uses practical exercising and capability validation to help expose supply chain risk.[8]

Immersive offers a Resilience Score that quantifies an organization's ability to detect, respond to, and recover from cyber threats. Immersive's Resilience Score combines nine measured factors into a single value benchmarked against industry peers. Immersive measures workforce capability against the NIST NICE framework. Immersive maps defensive capabilities against real-world adversary tactics across the MITRE ATT&CK framework.[3][6][9]

A Resilience Pathway from Immersive is a structured, role-based development journey that maps an individual's or team's current capability to the skills a role requires. Custom Goals let customers define organization-specific capability targets. AI Knowledge Pass validates a person's AI-related knowledge before they're granted access to AI tools.[10]

Immersive AppSec brings together practical labs and dynamic range exercises that embed security into developer workflows. Developers use labs and interactive range exercises to demonstrate practical skills in identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities. Immersive hands-on cyber labs simulate threats across offensive, defensive, and application security domains. Immersive offers content that helps workforces prepare for Operational Technology (OT)-related attacks. Immersive One includes Red and Blue Team labs, secure coding, cloud security, and more. Immersive delivers its hands-on cybersecurity training, team exercises, and cyber drills in a single Enterprise platform.[2][4][5][6][7][9][10][11][12][13]

Immersive on the record

Sources

Immersive full record

  1. [1]immersivelabs.comImmersive · immersivelabs.com · undated page, accessed November 8, 2026 · Tier A
  2. [2]Immersive one launches ai knowledge pass to close ai governance gap with industry first access control capabilityImmersive · immersivelabs.com · published July 1, 2026 · Tier A
  3. [3]Prove Cyber Resilience with Drills & Labs | ImmersiveImmersive · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  4. [4]Cybersecurity for Manufacturing - ImmersiveImmersive · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  5. [5]Cybersecurity Training Platform for Teams & AI | ImmersiveImmersive · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  6. [6]Hands-On Cybersecurity Training & Labs - ImmersiveImmersive · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  7. [7]Cyber Range & Cybersecurity Exercises for AI ReadinessImmersive · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  8. [8]Cybersecurity Digital Tabletop Exercises for AI ReadinessImmersive · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  9. [9]Cyber Resilience Metrics & Benchmarking - ImmersiveImmersive · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  10. [10]Resilience Pathways: Cybersecurity Learning Paths - ImmersiveImmersive · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  11. [11]Secure SDLC Training - ImmersiveImmersive · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  12. [12]Financial Services Cybersecurity - ImmersiveImmersive · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  13. [13]Why Immersive - ImmersiveImmersive · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  14. [14]Immersive 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

Spot a factual error? Request a correction.