Welcome! This guide gives you a quick overview of how to use Simulations Labs to build, preview, and share your challenges through competitions.

1. Understand Your Site

When your Simulations Labs account is created, you will receive access to two portals: the Manager Portal, used by administrators to manage and oversee activities, and the Participant Portal, used by members to access and participate in simulations, challenges, and competitions.

Manager Portal 

The Manager Portal is your administration area where you manage everything related to your organization. From here, you can add and organize members, assign challenges, create and run competitions, and monitor performance and results.

Access link: https://[your-subdomain].simulationslabs.com/managerarea

Participant Portal 

The Participant Portal is where your members access the platform to participate in simulations, challenges, and competitions. It is the environment where they learn, practice, and complete assigned activities.

Access link: https://[your-subdomain].simulationslabs.com

2. Create Competition Page

• Competitions in Simulations Labs are flexible — they don’t have to mean just Capture the Flag (CTF) events. While CTFs are a popular use case, organizations can design competitions for different goals, such as: 
• Hiring & Assessments Run skill-based competitions to evaluate candidates in real-time, track performance, and identify top talent. 
• Internal Team Training Organize simulated attack/defense scenarios to strengthen your team’s technical skills. 
• University Programs Engage students with challenge-based learning that goes beyond theory and replicates real-world threats. 
• Community Engagement Host cybersecurity contests or gamified events to attract and connect with the wider security community 

Learn how to create a competition 

3. Onboard Your Participants 

The next step is to onboard your participants to the platform.

Participants should create their accounts through the Participant Portal using your organization's unique portal link:

Registration link:

https://[your-subdomain].simulationslabs.com/

Share this link with your participants (for example, via email or internal communication channels) and instruct them to register using it. This ensures they are correctly added under your organization.

After registering, participants will be able to access assigned simulations, challenges, competitions, and training activities through the Participant Portal.

4. Create Your Challenges

You have two options for preparing challenges for your simulation or competition:

Option 1: Create Your Own Challenges

Build your own challenges using the challenge creation tools. Simulations Labs supports multiple challenge formats, including:

• Text-based challenges
• Downloadable file challenges 
• Docker container challenges 
• Or a combination of these formats

You can also invite teammates to contribute and collaborate on challenge creation.

Learn how to invite a team member 

Learn how to:

• Create a text challenge  
• Create a Docker container challenge  
• Create a downloadable file challenge  
• Learn about challenge types  

Option 2: Use Simulations Copilot

Use Simulations Copilot to discover and select ready-made challenges from the platform's challenge library. The library includes challenges across various cybersecurity domains, including web security, digital forensics, reverse engineering, cryptography, and more.

Learn about Simulations Copilot  

5. Launch Your Competition

Once your competition is configured and your challenges are ready, add the challenges to your competition. After that, share the competition link with your participants so they can join and start participating.

Learn how to publish your competition 

6. Monitor Your Live Competition

Once the competition is running, track progress, view submissions, and manage your participants in real time.

How to monitor a competition