CyberHire vs Immersive Labs: Screening candidates vs upskilling teams

I never bought Immersive Labs when I was hiring SOC analysts. Not because they are not a serious product. They are. I bounced because they sell a tool for a problem I did not have. My problem was filtering 200 cyber CVs down to eight humans worth interviewing. Their pitch is helping those eight stay sharp once you have already hired them.

Both real problems. Two different products.

The short version

Immersive Labs is a cyber upskilling, exercise, and resilience-reporting platform for existing security teams. The buyer is a CISO who needs to prove readiness to the board, evidence resilience to a regulator, and keep the team’s skills current against MITRE ATT&CK and DORA. CyberHire is a hands-on screening platform for hiring new cyber security people. The buyer is a hiring manager with a stack of CVs and a shortlist deadline.

If you are training, Immersive Labs. If you are hiring, CyberHire. Most mature teams need both, eventually. Almost nobody needs either to do the other one’s job.

What Immersive Labs is built for

Immersive Labs (their platform brand is Immersive One) sells four things, and they sell them well.

• Continuous upskilling for technical security teams. Hands-On Labs, AI Hands-On Labs, Application Security training, Red Team and Blue Team labs. New content ships constantly, mapped to current threats.
• Cyber drills, exercises, and crisis simulations. The kind a CISO runs to find out how the incident response process actually performs under pressure.
• Workforce-wide exercises. Non-technical staff included. Finance, HR, and the engineering org getting trained on basic security hygiene with measurable progress.
• Benchmarking and reporting. How your team compares to peers, mapped to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK, NIST 800-53, OWASP Top 10, and increasingly DORA. Board-ready resilience evidence.

Their case studies tell the story: HSBC, Elastic, Specsavers, Mercedes Benz, UK government agencies. Large organisations with established security teams that need to keep them sharp, prove readiness, and report up. Forrester named them a Leader in the 2026 Wave for cyber security skills and training platforms. They earn that.

What they do not sell is candidate screening for hiring. Their entire product surface assumes the user is already an employee. The benchmarking compares “your team” to “peer teams”. The drills are run by “your CISO”. The training is for “your workforce”. Nothing in the pitch is calibrated for the applicants you have not hired yet.

Where Immersive Labs is the right call

Credit where it is due. If your top-of-mind problem is one of these, Immersive Labs is the platform you should be looking at.

• Continuous upskilling for an existing team. You have eight SOC analysts and you need them current as the threat landscape moves. The hands-on lab format is genuinely good for this and the content cadence is hard to match.
• Cyber drills and exercises. You want to stress-test how your team responds to a realistic incident. Their cyber drills product is purpose-built for this and has years of refinement behind it.
• Board and regulator reporting. You need to walk into a board meeting with a number on cyber resilience. You need to file something against DORA. Their reporting layer is built for exactly that.
• Workforce-wide security training. You need to train the wider organisation on basic security hygiene, with measurable progress. Their workforce exercises product covers this.

If any of those is your problem, do not let a comparison post talk you out of it. Book the demo, see the platform, make the call.

Where Immersive Labs cannot help you

The comparison gets honest fast when the problem is hiring.

It does not screen candidates

A candidate, by definition, is not on your payroll. Immersive Labs has no candidate-facing flow. There is no way to send an external email address an assessment, get a calibrated score back, run integrity checks against the result, and rank that person against the rest of your applicants. The product lives on the inside of the organisation.

That is not a missing feature. It is a different product.

There is no calibrated hiring test from a job spec

You cannot paste a SOC analyst job specification into Immersive Labs and get back a tailored screening assessment. You can subscribe your existing analysts to a learning path. Useful for them. Useless for the eighty applicants whose CVs are sitting in your inbox.

CyberHire does this in minutes. Paste the job spec, get a calibrated assessment back, edit anything, send it. Time-to-first-calibrated-test in minutes, not weeks.

Custom challenges are not admin-prompted

A hiring manager who wants a challenge that does not exist - “build me a KQL hunt for a suspected Kerberoasting attack against this AD environment” - cannot ask the platform to generate one. The library is the library. CyberHire lets admins prompt for a custom challenge in plain English, generated, reviewed, deployed.

There is no integrity tier built for external candidates

The threat model of a trusted internal learner with no incentive to cheat is nothing like the threat model of a candidate trying to land a £75k job. Immersive Labs’ integrity surface is designed for the first. CyberHire has three integrity tiers - Standard, Secure, Proctor - configured per assessment, with a UK GDPR-aligned candidate consent flow built specifically around cyber-hiring integrity signals.

There is no public pricing

Immersive Labs is enterprise-led. Pricing is by demo. If your hiring problem cannot wait three weeks for a procurement cycle to close, it is not the right tool.

CyberHire publishes its prices. Trial is free for 14 days, no card. Starter is £249 a month on annual billing. You can be running your first calibrated assessment by the end of the afternoon.

Feature comparison

Dimension	CyberHire	Immersive Labs
Built for	Hiring new cyber security people	Upskilling and exercising existing teams
Candidate-facing screening flow	Yes, end to end	None
Calibrated assessment from a job spec	Yes, AI-generated	No
Admin-prompted custom challenges	Yes, in plain English	No
Real Linux / KQL / log environments	Yes, per candidate	Yes, for internal learners
Integrity tiering for external candidates	Three tiers, candidate consent flow	Designed for trusted internal users
Cyber drills and crisis simulations	No	Yes, market-leading
Workforce-wide security awareness	No	Yes
Board-reportable resilience scores	No	Yes
MITRE ATT&CK / DORA / NIST-mapped reporting	No	Yes
Public pricing	Yes	Demo-only
Time to first calibrated test	Minutes	Weeks (procurement-led)

They are not actually competitors

Worth saying out loud. Immersive Labs and CyberHire are not after the same buyer or the same budget.

Immersive Labs sells to the CISO, the head of security training, the head of incident response, the learning and development function inside a security organisation. The budget line is “team readiness and resilience reporting”.

CyberHire sells to the cyber hiring manager, the talent function inside a security team, the founder of a smaller security-led company who is doing the hiring herself. The budget line is “talent acquisition and screening”.

A mature security organisation eventually buys both. They use Immersive Labs to keep their incumbent team current, run drills, benchmark, and report to the board. They use CyberHire to filter the applicants for the next hire down to a calibrated, ranked shortlist before the SOC lead spends a single hour on a first interview.

If you are being told to pick one, you are being given a false choice.

When CyberHire is the right call

• You have open cyber security roles and a stack of applicants.
• You want to measure hands-on skill in an environment that looks like the job, not a multiple-choice approximation of it.
• You want a calibrated assessment in minutes, not weeks.
• You want three integrity tiers built for external candidates, not for trusted internal learners.
• You want public pricing and a 14-day trial that does not require a procurement cycle.

One honest sentence

If you are training your team, Immersive Labs is one of the best in the market and a comparison post is not going to change your mind. If you are hiring, you are looking at the wrong tool, and we built the right one.