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Following its launch in 2024, Gartner® has now published the second Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security —and KnowBe4 is delighted to once again be named a Leader!
Email security is critical for all organizations globally. Fueled by factors such as GenAI and crime-as-a-service toolkits, the phishing threat landscape continues to become more sophisticated at an alarming pace. Our Phishing Threat Trends Report revealed that malicious emails increased by 15% year to date in 2025, with 84% of all attacks using some form of AI (for example, to generate text or payloads or automate personalization). Consequently, organizations are now more likely than ever to be targeted by advanced phishing threats.
At the same time, organizations also remain subject to outbound data loss incidents caused by employees selecting the wrong recipients via email autocomplete functionality, attaching the wrong documents or failing to use the Bcc field.
Email Security Approaches For an Accelerating Threat Landscape
Against this backdrop, we believe the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Security Platforms encompasses a broad spectrum of email security providers to include traditional secure email gateways (SEGs) and integrated cloud email security (ICES), like KnowBe4 Defend. While SEGs provide customers with a solid foundation to block known threats using signature-based detection, they struggle against more advanced attacks—such as those that are sent from compromised legitimate email accounts (business email compromise), rely solely on social engineering tactics (without a traditional malicious payload) and that use technical measures to obfuscate their payloads.
ICES products fill this gap, leveraging AI-powered detection and machine learning (including linguistic models such as natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU)) to detect advanced phishing and zero-day attacks that SEGs can miss.
On the outbound, ICES leverage contextual machine learning, relationship mapping and content analysis to prevent accidental data loss and intentional exfiltration.
Finally, due to the way they’re architected, some ICES products can provide employees with context-specific warnings for both inbound phishing threats and outbound mistakes. This feature leverages behavioral science principles, such as nudge theory, to sustainably increase employee awareness about threats to email security.
Acquiring a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader and Accelerating its Growth
KnowBe4 completed its acquisition of email security provider Egress in 2024, just ahead of the publication of the first Magic Quadrant for Email Security Platforms—where Egress (by then a KnowBe4 company) placed in the Leader’s quadrant. Since then, KnowBe4 has added the Cloud Email Security products to its HRM+ platform.
KnowBe4 acquired Egress to help its 70,000+ global customers improve their defenses in an increasingly hostile threat landscape. Consequently, KnowBe4 has invested heavily in its inbound anti-phishing product, now KnowBe4 Defend. A top priority has been ensuring that customers can quickly and easily deploy all our Cloud Email Security products, so they immediately benefit from improved defenses and start realizing return on investment (ROI). This led to the launch of the KnowBe4 Deployment Center, which in a few clicks, enables administrators to deploy our products within minutes.
Behind the scenes, we introduced the KnowBe4 Agentic Detection Engine, which leverages sophisticated NLP and NLU models, including tokenization, lemmatization, common word removal, entity recognition and linguistic construct build. This enables us to detect a broader spectrum of advanced phishing threats. We also ensured that these models are protected from malicious activities by cybercriminals targeting the AI behind security tooling.
And it’s paid off! As well as welcoming new customers, we’re delighted by the strong uptake for all of the Cloud Email Security products in KnowBe4’s existing customer base, who were already benefitting from our leading security awareness training (SAT).
In particular, we’ve seen the number of users protected by KnowBe4 Defend more than double in 2025—and we’re still not quite done with the year yet!
Our Commitment to Continued Product Enhancement
We believe the future is bright for KnowBe4 customers. We are accelerating investment in all the products that make up our HRM+ platform, particularly our Cloud Email Security offering. Over the next 12 months, customers can expect to see new functionality to enhance threat detection, help them to securely layer more AI agents into their environments and deliver hyper-personalized coaching to raise employees’ awareness about the specific threats they face.
Talk to one of our team members to learn more about how KnowBe4 Cloud Email Security can protect your organization from advanced inbound and outbound threats.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Email Security, Max Taggett, Nikul Patel, 1 December 2025
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