HailBytes SAT vs Gophish

Pricing & Cost Model

HailBytes figures are the 1-year commitment price (delivered as an AWS or Azure private offer, not a discount on the published meter) with list alongside, so the comparison sits on the same annual-contract basis as the competitor column. The meter covers software only; the VM, storage, and networking run in your own cloud account and are billed separately at roughly $35/vCPU/month, $164/month at 2 vCPU, $220 at 4, $280 at 8, $560 at 16, and $1,120 at 32, so scale that line to the size on the row you are reading.

Our cost steps with headcount rather than scaling per seat, so every break-even on this page is calculated all-in against the rung that actually serves that headcount: 2 vCPU up to 1,500 learners (about $4,908/year all-in on a 1-year commitment, $6,168 at list), 4 vCPU up to 5,000 (about $8,520 / $11,040), and 8 vCPU up to 10,000 (about $15,120 / $20,160). The price figures are exact, because the meter is linear in vCPU, but the 2- and 4-vCore learner bands are scaled from the 8-vCore band by measured throughput ratio rather than published as specifications, so size against your own send and training volume. Full pricing.

Gophish’s real cost is engineering time: standing it up, hardening it, configuring SMTP deliverability, building reporting, and operating it. For a one-off red-team engagement that’s fine. For a continuous program at 500+ users it’s a meaningful operational tax. Both options run on your own cloud account, so the honest comparison is our software fee against labour: at a fully-loaded $100–$150 per hour for a senior engineer (the rate this claim assumes, and the only rate it rests on) the $11,760/year committed instance buys out roughly 78–118 hours a year, or 112–168 hours at the $16,800 list price. If your team can build and run the equivalent in fewer hours than that, Gophish is the cheaper answer.

Architecture & Control

Capability Comparison

When HailBytes SAT Wins

• Continuous program operation. SSO, audit logs, multi-tenant isolation, and packaged deliverability config remove the operational tax of running Gophish for the long haul.
• MSSPs and pen-test firms. Per-instance multi-tenancy and white-label support make resold simulation viable. Gophish needs custom multi-tenant work to do this safely.
• Cloud-first procurement. Marketplace charges count toward AWS EDP / Azure MACC commits. Free OSS doesn’t spend down those commits.
• Compliance evidence. SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS evidence export is built in.

When Gophish Wins

• One-off red-team engagements. Gophish is the standard primitive for short-lived, single-engagement campaigns and lab environments.
• You have engineering capacity and a strict zero-software-cost mandate.
• You want to fork the codebase and build something custom on top. Gophish is MIT-licensed; the HailBytes Commercial License permits modification for your own deployment but not redistribution.

Try HailBytes SAT

30-day free trial through AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace, including the underlying VM. If you’ve been running Gophish and the operational tax is starting to show, this is a five-minute test.

Related Comparisons

HailBytes SAT is built on the Gophish engine, so a Gophish shortlist tends to expand into the rest of the lower-friction / suite-bundled SAT options before a full enterprise SaaS:

• vs Sophos Phish Threat: bundled with Sophos Central.
• vs Ninjio: animated story-based training at the lighter end.
• vs CybSafe: behaviour-science training platform.
• Full SAT comparison matrix: every vendor side by side, plus the HailBytes SAT product page.