Google CTF vs Hack The Box Business: 2026 Comparison
Google CTF is a free cyber range training tool. Hack The Box Business is a commercial cyber range training tool by Hack The Box. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best cyber range training fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Security teams building internal training programs need Google CTF because it's free and hosted, eliminating infrastructure overhead while letting your staff practice against real attack scenarios without setup friction. The platform includes hundreds of challenges across cryptography, reverse engineering, and web exploitation, and because Google maintains it, the technical quality of problems consistently exceeds what most organizations build in-house. Skip this if your team needs a managed service with progress tracking, compliance reporting, or role-based learning paths; Google CTF is a bare-bones competition platform, not an LMS.
Mid-market and enterprise security teams that struggle to close skills gaps in offensive security and incident response should use Hack The Box Business; its combination of hands-on labs, realistic SOC simulations through Threat Range, and structured Academy curricula means your team actually practices exploiting and defending systems rather than watching videos. The platform maps directly to NIST PR.AT (awareness and training) and ID.IM (improvement), which matters if you're building a defensible training program for compliance audits. Skip this if your priority is compliance checkbox training or you need a system that also handles role-based access governance; HTB is built for practitioners who want to break things, not administrators managing who can see what.
