Phished vs Guardey — a detailed comparison

Security awareness training is an essential part of protecting your organization from cyber threats. Two platforms that aim to help businesses with this are Phished and Guardey. While both offer phishing simulations and training programs, they take very different approaches to security awareness.

In this article, we’ll compare Phished and Guardey, highlighting their key similarities and differences, user experience, pricing, and ultimately, which platform might be the right fit for your organization.

Phished vs Guardey — key similarities and differences

💡 Main features

The biggest difference between Phished and Guardey is their focus. Phished primarily emphasizes phishing simulations and reporting, while Guardey offers a broader approach to security awareness training with a strong focus on engagement and gamification.

Here are some key differences:

• Phished specializes in phishing simulations, offering personalized fake phishing emails tailored to the user’s role, language, and awareness level. They also provide a phishing report button within the users’ email client. Guardey is currently working on this feature, which is not yet live.
• Guardey also offers phishing simulations, but in addition, it provides a more comprehensive training approach that includes the possibility to launch a spear phishing simulation designed to test employees against more sophisticated, targeted attacks (learn more).
• Gamified security awareness: Guardey provides leaderboards, streaks, achievements, and an engaging storyline, whereas Phished has no real gamification beyond basic quizzes.
• Phished offers additional products, such as Zero Incident Mail, which rewrites unknown links and opens them in a secure environment, and Threat Alerts, which provide updates on recent cybersecurity events.

While Phished is more focused on phishing, Guardey delivers a more well-rounded security awareness program that trains employees more frequently and in a more engaging way.

🕹️ Gamification

Gamification plays a significant role in driving engagement and increasing retention in security awareness training.

Guardey excels in gamification, offering:

• A storyline that immerses users in cybersecurity challenges
• Leaderboards to encourage competition
• Achievements and streaks to reward consistent participation
• Immediate feedback to reinforce learning

Phished, on the other hand, only offers immediate feedback after phishing simulations and training quizzes. While their training is interactive, it lacks the key elements that make gamification effective, such as competition and rewards.

Phished’s training content includes videos, whereas Guardey does not use videos to keep the learning experience active and short.

👥 The user experience

Buying experience

One major difference between the two platforms is how they approach transparency in their sales process. Phished does not display pricing or show their product on their website, requiring potential customers to engage with sales before understanding costs.

Guardey, on the other hand, provides a transparent product overview and a quote within 24 hours, making it easier for organizations to evaluate before committing.

Users about Phished

“Phished has thousands of phishing templates available across a variety of languages, brands and countries which keeps a wide variety of attack vectors to use against users. There is also many domains that help minimise users mesmerising which domains come from Phished. Sometimes the training content within the Phished Academy can be subjective or open to opinion by users, and also not all of the content can be relevant to your particular organisation setup or country that you live in.” – Source

“It is very easy to set up as an admin and easy to use as an end-user. The information ranges widely and lessons are short and sweet. It is easy to squeeze one in every week. Design is nice. The phishing emails are easy to spot (for me), but still some colleagues fell for them, so they definitely work. The lessons are sometimes a bit too simplistic, with multiple choice answers where, even without having done the lesson, you can guess the correct answer.” – Source

Users about Guardey

“I’ve noticed that many users are truly fanatic about Guardey, which is a big step up from our previous security awareness solution.” – Source

“The uptick in training participation has been fantastic. Most users are regularly performing the training. I think this is because Guardey doesn’t take a lot of time. And most of all, it’s fun. Employees have even set up their own little competitions internally. So we have the company-wide leaderboard, but the teams themselves are now even having their little competitions in Microsoft Teams group chats. Guardey has brought out the competitive nature in them.” – Source

💰Pricing

One of the most significant differences between Phished and Guardey is pricing transparency.

• Phished does not display pricing on its website. Instead, they provide custom quotes based on the number of users and the mix of products purchased.
• Research indicates Phished quotes €5 to €6.5 per user per month, depending on the selected features. This makes them significantly more expensive than Guardey.
• Guardey prices on user count alone, with no minimum team size and no add-ons, and your quote lands within 24 hours.
• Smaller businesses (below 500 users) cannot buy Phished’s security awareness training separately, as it comes bundled with their phishing simulation product at a higher price.

The verdict: which platform should you use?

Both Guardey and Phished provide security awareness training and phishing simulations, but they take very different approaches.

• If your main concern is phishing simulations and phishing reporting, Phished may be a suitable option, as it specializes in phishing-related training and technical solutions like Zero Incident Mail.
• If you want a more engaging and gamified security awareness training solution, Guardey is the clear winner. Guardey offers weekly training, real gamification, a 14-day free trial, and spear phishing simulations, all at a more affordable price.

Ultimately, if you want an affordable, engaging, and well-rounded security awareness solution that goes beyond just phishing, Guardey is the best choice for most organizations.