EC-Council

EC-Council organizes its 30-plus certifications into clear tiers. The Essentials series sits at the entry point: 9 beginner certifications including Ethical Hacking Essentials (EHE), Network Defense Essentials (NDE), and Digital Forensics Essentials (DFE), with no eligibility criteria and course bundles priced around $299. Above that sit the core role certifications, led by the flagship Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) alongside Certified Network Defender (CND), Computer Hacking Forensic Investigator (CHFI), Certified SOC Analyst (CSA), Certified Incident Handler (ECIH), and Certified Threat Intelligence Analyst (CTIA). Specialist tracks cover cloud (CCSE), DevSecOps (ECDE), application security (CASE .NET and Java), encryption (ECES), ICS/SCADA, and disaster recovery (EDRP). At the top, the Certified Chief Information Security Officer (CCISO) targets security executives and relaunched as v4 in 2026.

Picking a starting point is mostly a budget and experience question. If you have no security background, an Essentials certification proves baseline skills for a fraction of CEH's cost: the CEH exam voucher alone runs $1,199 at Pearson VUE, and self-study candidates must clear an eligibility application before they can even buy it. If you already work in IT or security, CEH remains the credential hiring managers recognize, while specialists like CSA, ECIH, or CHFI map to specific SOC, incident response, and forensics roles and often make more sense than a second generalist cert. Whatever you pick, plan for renewal: every EC-Council certification is valid for 3 years and requires 120 ECE (EC-Council Continuing Education) credits per certification in that window, plus an $80 annual membership fee ($100 for CCISO).

CertCompanion carries practice banks for 20 EC-Council certifications, more than 12,000 questions in total. That includes all three original Essentials exams (EHE, NDE, and DFE with 626 to 627 questions each), the core lineup (594 CEH questions, plus CND, CHFI, CSA, ECIH, and a 740-question CTIA bank), the specialist tracks (ECES, ICS/SCADA, CASE .NET, CASE Java, CCSE, ECDE, EDRP, CCT, CSCU, and CEI), and 578 questions for CCISO. Every exam gives you 30 free questions, so you can gauge difficulty across two or three candidate certifications before committing to one.

The portfolio is moving fast right now. In February 2026 EC-Council launched an Enterprise AI Credential Suite, four role-based AI certifications (Certified AI Program Manager, Certified Offensive AI Security Professional, Certified Responsible AI Governance and Ethics, and AI Essentials) alongside the CCISO v4 overhaul, which EC-Council calls the largest single expansion in its 25-year history. If you are comparing EC-Council against other vendors in 2026, that AI push, plus AI-driven modules folded into CEH itself, is the clearest differentiator.