An employee receives an email about an overdue invoice. A few minutes later, someone calls, sounds like their manager, and asks them to approve it. A phishing simulation program that only tests suspicious links in an email doesn't cover a situation like this.
Phishing simulation tools let employees practice handling these requests through controlled exercises. The right platform helps people question unusual instructions and report suspicious activity. It also gives security teams useful evidence about where employees need support. The nine tools below cover different needs, from customized email campaigns to adaptive practice and coordinated impersonation exercises.
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Which phishing simulation tools should you shortlist?
If you want to specialize simulations by role
- Noon Security: Personalizes phishing, voice and deepfake exercises around each employee’s role and history.
- Adaptive Security: Runs coordinated campaigns that move across email, voice and chat the way real attacks do.
If you want to combine employee practice with live protection
- Noon Security: Folds simulations into a platform that also protects inboxes, devices and AI use.
- IRONSCALES: Pairs its simulations and training with its own email-protection plans.
If you want to build scenarios that reflect your organization
- Noon Security: Uses an AI scenario builder to shape exercises around the decisions your team actually faces.
- KnowBe4: Offers editable templates and landing pages, with AIDA orchestration for recurring campaigns.
If you need to lean on an existing Microsoft investment
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Runs attack simulation training inside the Defender portal for teams on Plan 2 or E5.
If you want to run campaigns on infrastructure you control
- Gophish: gives technical teams self-hosted control of email campaigns, if you can take on its maintenance and security upkeep.
Where phishing simulation tools often fall short
The exercise is too generic
A fake parcel-delivery email teaches an employee almost nothing about approving a supplier’s new bank details. The exercise worth running asks whether someone actually follows the verification process your organization already has. For finance, that might mean calling the supplier back on a number you recorded before the request arrived. For the help desk, it might mean refusing to skip account-recovery checks for a caller in a hurry.
The attack stops at the inbox
A request that starts as an email continues by phone, text or a message in Slack, and the second touch is what makes the first believable. A program confined to email never rehearses that. Supporting several channels helps, but sending unrelated messages through each one tests something different from a coordinated sequence where a familiar voice follows up on what the inbox already planted.
Every click gets counted the same
A click rate with no context doesn't tell you much about a phishing attack. A role-specific request and an obvious generic lure are not the same test, yet many tools treat them identically. NIST’s Phish Scale gives teams a way to rate how hard a simulated email actually was, which makes the results mean something. How fast people report, and how they recover after a mistake, matter as much as whether they clicked.
Training is left to carry everything
Practice is valuable, but no amount of it makes an employee responsible for catching every attack. Technical protection still has to stop the dangerous message, the malicious package and the request for access that should never have been granted. A simulation program should sit next to broader workforce protection that catches what the people don't.
How we evaluated these tools: Each entry below draws on the vendor’s own product and documentation pages, read at the time of writing, plus our own hands-on view where we have one. Where a capability depends on a specific license tier or self-hosting, we’ve said so.
Phishing simulation tools compared
The table describes the configurations discussed below. Channel availability, training content and additional protection can depend on the subscription or services selected.
Top 9 phishing simulation tools
1. Noon Security
What it does: Noon is Aikido Security’s workforce security platform. Its attack simulations go past the phishing email into vishing, smishing and deepfake impersonation, each one personalized by an employee’s role and past behavior. Multistep campaigns and an AI scenario builder let teams move beyond sending everyone the same recognizable template.
Why it stands out: Designed to fit the way people actually make decisions at work. A finance team gets to rehearse verifying an urgent payment request, and an employee taking an apparent help-desk call learns how to confirm who’s really on the line, so the outcome is a repeatable response even when the message looks convincing. Campaigns can run automatically from role and prior behavior, or an admin can pick the scenario. Fail one and the lesson arrives privately, through Noon, Slack, Teams or Google Chat. Around the simulations sit email protection, device protection against malicious software, and AI governance that shows which tools people connect and enforces team policy.
What to know. Noon is in early access, so confirm what’s available today and when the rest ships.
2. KnowBe4 Security Awareness Training
What it does: KnowBe4 pairs phishing exercises with learning content and reporting. Editable templates and landing pages let you build scenarios specific to your organization, and its Simulated Vishing feature extends the practice from email into voice calls.
Why it stands out: Its AIDA Orchestration is the draw for teams that want automation without giving up control. Administrators set the groups and off-limits content, and AIDA then personalizes each person’s activity against their individual risk. That combination suits a program large enough to need the campaigns running themselves but governed enough to require explicit limits on what any employee receives.
What to know: AIDA Orchestration comes with the AIDA or SAT Advanced subscriptions, so confirm your voice and callback entitlements in the proposed package. KnowBe4 also sells Defend and PhishER Plus, but those are live email-security functions and belong in a separate line of the budget from the training itself.
3. Hoxhunt Adaptive Phishing Training
What it does: Hoxhunt adjusts each exercise’s difficulty, cadence and type using an employee’s role and history. Its coverage spans email, SMS, voice and callback exercises, Microsoft Teams and deepfake video.
Why it stands out: The emphasis is recurring practice and coaching that lands the moment someone slips, rather than a quarterly campaign you build by hand. Threat intelligence and real reported phishing feed the scenarios, and each round of clicks and reports shapes what comes next. That makes it a fit when a security team wants a continuous learning program and less time spent preparing every campaign from scratch.
What to know: Confirm which channels your package actually includes and how much say you have over an individual campaign’s sequence. Hoxhunt’s Email Incident Response Automation is a separate product, so a training purchase on its own won’t give you a complete inbox-response service.
4. Adaptive Security
What it does: Adaptive Security runs campaigns across email, voice, SMS and chat, including synthetic audio and video impersonation. Scenarios can draw on public information and employee context, with messages and landing experiences you can edit.
Why it stands out: Its Auto-Phish workflow builds and deploys simulations once you’ve set the cadence and targeting, and the AI-generated personas give you real control over who the attacker appears to be. The platform earns its place when you want to rehearse a request that opens in email and gains credibility through a follow-up call, the sequence that trips people up in real incidents.
What to know: Set clear limits on the personal information used to build scenarios, and decide who signs off on sensitive impersonation exercises before they go out. Adaptive’s email-security offering is separate from the simulation work here, and a follow-up lesson isn’t the same as removing a real threat.
5. Keepnet
What it does: Keepnet’s phishing simulator sits alongside separate SMS and voice simulation products. Teams get realistic templates, AI-assisted scenario creation and campaign reporting to test how employees respond across more than one channel.
Why it stands out: The vishing simulator is the interesting part. It runs two-way AI voice conversations that adapt to what the employee says back, while the smishing side handles controlled SMS exercises with response feedback. This works for a program that has outgrown email-only testing and wants to see results broken out channel by channel.
What to know: Pin down which simulators and which learning content are actually in the purchase. If what you need is one coordinated email-to-phone conversation, ask to see that exact sequence demonstrated, because separate per-channel capabilities don’t automatically add up to a single orchestrated campaign. Incident-response tooling is its own scope again.
6. Cofense Phishing Training
What it does: Cofense Phishing Training, which some readers know as PhishMe, uses real phishing intelligence to shape its simulations and awareness content. The platform leans on demonstrated employee competency and reporting behavior, and on surfacing where training coverage is thin.
Why it stands out: It carries scenarios for SMS, voice and QR-code phishing, and for programs that specifically need the email-to-phone exercise, the separately ordered Callback Phishing service handles delivery and follow-up. Cofense can also send simulations while people are actively working their inbox, which brings real work patterns into the timing of a test.
What to know: Confirm how each channel you need is delivered and which services are actually bundled. Employee reporting and training don’t automatically include Cofense’s separate investigation, remediation or managed defense work, so scope those in if your program depends on them.
7. IRONSCALES
What it does: IRONSCALES Human Risk Management brings together simulations, awareness training and a per-user risk score. Paired with its Email Protect plan, it puts employee practice and live inbox defense in the same platform.
Why it stands out: Its Phishing Simulation Agent uses public-web information to build targeted exercises, and the results, training outcomes and reported messages all feed each user’s risk score, with training assignments following on automatically. That suits a team that wants employee reports and practice results to drive an ongoing email-security program rather than sitting in a separate awareness silo.
What to know: Specify both the email plan and the HRM capabilities you expect in the purchase, since managed service providers also offer HRM on its own. Check the plan and add-ons where your curriculum needs more content, and remember a simulation result and a real threat removal stay separate things to measure.
8. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Attack Simulation Training
What it does: Microsoft’s Attack Simulation Training lets administrators pick an email attack technique and payload, choose recipients, assign training and review the results inside the Defender portal. The techniques on offer include credential prompts, attachment-based scenarios and requests for application consent.
Why it stands out: Its simulation automations handle recurring campaigns and the training attached to them. The real appeal is proximity. If email exercises meet your immediate need and you already hold the right licenses, running them inside a portal your team already manages is the path of least resistance.
What to know: Attack Simulation Training needs Microsoft 365 E5 or Defender for Office 365 Plan 2, so it isn’t part of every Microsoft subscription. On-premises mailboxes get reduced reporting, and the email and QR-code payloads shouldn’t be mistaken for voice or chat simulation channels, which this doesn’t cover.
9. Gophish
What it does: Gophish is an open-source framework for authorized phishing exercises. A team manages its recipient groups, email templates, landing pages, scheduled delivery and campaign events on infrastructure it runs itself.
Why it stands out: The appeal is control over hosting and configuration. A team with the technical capacity can run a bounded email exercise and build its own follow-up learning, with nothing routed through a vendor. That same control hands you the sending infrastructure, data handling, reporting and upkeep as your responsibility.
What to know: Security maintenance is the real constraint. The project’s release page lists version 0.12.1 as the latest, and GitHub’s reviewed advisory for CVE-2022-45003 marks versions through 0.12.1 as affected with no patched release named. Resolve that exposure before you deploy. A free license isn’t on its own a good enough reason to pick this.
How to choose a phishing simulation tool
Start with a business scenario
Pick two or three decisions your employees actually have to get right. Verifying a changed bank account, challenging an unexpected account-recovery request, reporting an out-of-place invitation to connect an AI tool. Decide what action you want to see before you go anywhere near a template or a channel, because the scenario is what the exercise is really testing.
Match the automation to your team’s capacity
Scenario generation, recipient selection, scheduling, difficulty adjustment and follow-up learning are all separate jobs, and a tool may automate some while leaving the rest to an administrator. Work out which ones your people need to control by hand and which should run on their own.
Make the response measurable
Check whether the tool's reporting tells a click apart from a completed action, whether employees can report something suspicious through a tool they already use, and how results get compared over time. Factor in scenario difficulty and who received it. Check how the vendor excludes automated link scanners from the numbers, so a security tool’s activity isn’t logged against an employee.
Plan protection around the exercise
A specialist simulator is the right call when your existing protections already hold up. A broader platform makes more sense when the same team is also wrestling with inbox threats, employee devices and AI use.
Put realistic practice inside a program that protects the whole workforce
A good phishing exercise ends with the employee knowing exactly what to do next. Call the supplier back on a number you trusted before the request came in. Verify the unexpected ask through a second channel. Report the message before acting on it. The lesson has to be that specific, or the practice doesn’t transfer to the moment it matters.
Noon puts that practice next to the technical protection the same security team is already responsible for, so employee judgment and the controls around inboxes, devices and AI use are planned together rather than bought piecemeal. Book a Noon demo to see the personalized simulations, the learning employees get after a slip, and the wider workforce protection in one place.
