LetsDefend started in 2021 as a blue team training platform and grew to hundreds of thousands of learners. Hack The Box bought it in September 2025, and the site now says so on the front page. The core product is the SOC Simulator: a fake security operations centre where alerts arrive in a queue and you have to investigate them using logs, endpoint data, email and threat intel, then close them correctly. Around that sit more than 150 courses and several learning paths: SOC Analyst, Incident Response, DFIR, Malware Analysis and SIEM Engineer, plus prep paths for CompTIA CySA+ and the Google Cybersecurity Certificate. Labs run in the browser and are mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. So why is a non-AI platform on an AI course review site? Because the AI SOC analyst is one of the loudest pitches in security right now.
Vendors promise that an agent will triage your alerts. Maybe it will, partly. But somebody still has to check the agent's reasoning, catch the confident wrong answer and decide what to do next, and that person needs to know how to triage an alert by hand. LetsDefend teaches that better than anything else at this price. The pricing is reasonable.
The free tier lets you try the simulator and some courses. VIP runs $16.99 a month billed annually or $24.99 monthly, and VIP+ $29.99 to $39.99. Students get half off with a .edu email. The weak spots are what you would expect. The certificates are completion certificates, not recognised certifications, so treat them as portfolio items.
AI content is thin. Hack The Box said at acquisition time that it would bring its in-house AI to make scenarios more adaptive, but I have not seen much of that land yet. And as with any acquisition, there is a risk the brand gets absorbed and the product changes. Overall, I rate it as the most practical cheap SOC training around. Learn to work the queue yourself first.
Then you will be able to tell when an AI tool is doing it badly.