Choosing Your Lab Platform: HTB Academy or TryHackMe
Compare HackTheBox Academy and TryHackMe for legal hands-on practice: VPN access, the CPTS path, and concrete benchmarks to help you choose a platform.
The course uses HackTheBox (HTB) Academy as its foundation. The content is well structured, the exercises are graded, and the "Penetration Tester" job role path (aligned with the CPTS certification) covers 28 modules that map almost perfectly onto the 15 weeks.
HackTheBox, TryHackMe: what are they?
These are two online platforms for practicing offensive security, both legal and designed for learning. You connect through a browser (plus a VPN to attack the machines) and solve exercises on targets hosted by the platform, so you never break anything illegally.
- HackTheBox (HTB): two parts. HTB Academy offers theory courses plus graded exercises, module by module. HTB Labs offers machines to hack (called "boxes").
- TryHackMe (THM): highly guided, visual, step-by-step "rooms," ideal for beginners.
The two companies share the global offensive-security training market: HTB reports more than 3 million users in 2025, THM more than 4 million. Both are British, which is no accident: the UK was an early champion of cyber training through its NCSC.