Invest in Capability That Compounds.

Premium opens every Premium course. Specialist opens every course. Detection rules, architecture decisions, investigation playbooks, and hardening configurations you deploy at work and keep permanently. Less than a single day of consulting, and the artifacts are yours forever.

Read a full module before you decide.

Every course opens with lessons you can read in full without an account, without a card, and without a trial clock. Read one, run the exercises, and only then decide whether the depth is right for your work.

Browse the free previews
Free

Free

$0
No account needed
  • Free preview in every course
  • Practice labs you can actually work, across the SOC Simulator, Forensic Lab and the query labs
  • Run the exercises in your own tenant
  • No account or card needed
Specialist

Specialist

$29/month
or $289/year and save 17%
  • Everything in Premium
  • Advanced architecture and identity engineering courses
  • Offensive security and purple teaming
  • Deep-dive memory and endpoint forensics
Cancel renewal anytime · Stripe · Instant access
Business

Business

$324/seat/year
Choose how many seats your team needs
  • Everything in Specialist
  • A named seat for each team member
  • Add or remove seats anytime
  • Single invoice for expense reporting
Subscribe Business
Cancel renewal anytime · Stripe · Instant access

What Subscribers Say

“Was a bit hesitant, but it’s been money well spent. A single subscription to all the courses is a good deal. The KQL for Detection and Threat Hunting course gave a lot of production-ready queries, and I found the investigation playbooks extremely helpful as they worked well for our environment.”

Neo

“The Microsoft 365 Threat Hunting course provided a lot of strategies and ideas for campaigns with repeatable processes. We used the material, especially the cheatsheets and walkthroughs, to run our first proper hunt the week after finishing the modules.”

Kagiso

“Really enjoyed the Conditional Access Design modules. It forced us to measure our actual coverage instead of assuming it. Now it’s much easier to spot our gaps and evaluate the effectiveness of our production policies.”

Jamie R.

“After the Detection Engineering course we deployed 40+ validated rules, with little adjustment needed for our environment. They worked perfectly.”

Chris

“The DFIR courses have really simplified the process, instead of the collect-everything-and-sort-it-later approach. I liked the structured walkthroughs of the investigation process, and I’m glad the courses are built around open-source tools, which makes things easier for us.”

Dale

“I’ve taken several M365 courses, and most are focused on the products and features, but not on how to incorporate them into your existing solutions or real-world applications. The courses here skip the generic Microsoft marketing and focus on how to actually handle real security issues.”

Carlos

Getting Your Employer to Pay

A Specialist subscription costs less than a single day of security consulting. Your team gets structured professional development that produces documented architecture decisions, tested detection rules, and validated security configurations, artifacts your organization keeps permanently.

Forward this page to your manager with one sentence: “This is a professional development subscription that produces operational security artifacts for our environment, detection rules, architecture documentation, and investigation playbooks. It costs less than one day of consultant time per year.”

Ridgeline subscriptions are commonly expensed as professional development, training, or continuing education. Annual subscriptions generate a single invoice suitable for expense reporting or purchase orders.

Common Questions

Is it worth it?
Premium is $179 a year. The honest test is the free preview: read it, work through it, and judge whether it builds capability you will use at work. A subscription adds every course at your tier, the hosted practice environments and the practical exams, each with a certificate anyone can verify. If the preview does not convince you, no pricing page should.
What's the difference between Premium and Specialist?
Premium gives you access to every course marked Premium, detection engineering, incident response, threat hunting, SOC operations, KQL, and more. Specialist adds the advanced courses: Defending Active Directory, Endpoint Security Engineering, Endpoint Security Operations, Entra ID Identity and Access Management, macOS Endpoint Investigation, Memory Forensics, Microsoft 365 Security Architecture, Purple Teaming for Blue Teams, and Windows Endpoint Investigation. All subscribers get full access to the SOC Simulator, Forensic Lab, Playbook Suite, and every platform feature. You can see which tier a course requires on its course page.
Can I try before subscribing?
Every course includes a free preview, selected lessons you can read without an account. No signup required. All reference tools are free. Read the preview, run the exercises, and decide if the depth is right for your work.
What format is the content?
Written content only, no video. Each lesson explains a technique and the reasoning behind it, with the queries and commands written out to run, diagrams, worked investigation scenarios, knowledge checks and downloadable templates. Written content is searchable and quick to look up in the middle of an incident. It is a reference you come back to, not a lecture series.
What practice environments are included?
Every subscription includes the hosted practice environments, all running in the browser against Northgate Engineering, a simulated company of 810 staff and 865 endpoints. The SOC Simulator takes an alert from intake to a scored containment decision. The Incident Queue gives you several open incidents and the call on which to take first. The Forensic Lab holds generated evidence across Windows, Linux and cross-platform attacks. The Splunk Lab and AWS Query Lab grade the result your query returns. The Query Console is open KQL and SPL with no grading, Practice Tools holds design reviews and architecture tools, and the Playbook Suite covers incident response, triage, operational process and threat hunting. See them all in the Practice Hub.
Do I need a lab environment?
No. The practice environments are hosted and run in the browser. Some courses also have hands-on exercises in a tenant of your own, and for those, or if you want your own environment, the Lab Setup Guide walks you through building a lab on your own hardware: VMware, Windows 11, Ubuntu, a Microsoft 365 E5 developer tenant, Sentinel and the forensic toolchain.
Do I need an M365 tenant?
Only for some courses. A Microsoft 365 tenant is needed for the hands-on exercises in Entra ID Security, Entra ID Identity and Access Management, Microsoft 365 Security Architecture, Microsoft Security Automation, Microsoft Security Operations and Purple Teaming for Blue Teams, and is optional in Conditional Access Design, Endpoint Security Engineering and Microsoft 365 Data Security Engineering. Each course page lists what it needs. The Lab Setup Guide covers getting one.
Can my employer pay for this?
Yes. Annual subscriptions generate a single invoice. Most subscribers expense Ridgeline as professional development, training, or continuing education. Business subscriptions are priced per seat under a single billing account, with one annual invoice. You choose how many seats your team needs.
What if I cancel?
You keep access until the end of your billing period, with no penalty. Cancel from your account page at any time. Your progress and anything you downloaded stay with you, and your account returns to free access.
Can I get a refund?
No. Subscription payments, monthly or annual, are not refunded. The free preview in every course is the trial, so read it before you subscribe. Cancelling stops the next renewal, and you keep access until the end of the period you paid for. The Refund Policy has the detail.
Is this a replacement for certification training?
No. Certifications test whether you can pass an exam. Ridgeline builds whether you can do the job. The focus is operational capability, not exam prep. Every course ends in a practical exam with a verifiable certificate, and each course page states the CPE it carries.
Who built this?
Security professionals with over 15 years of experience in DFIR, detection engineering, and security operations across M365, Azure, Windows, and Linux environments. The content is built from operational experience, not vendor documentation. See the Company page for full background.