We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Email and IRONSCALES based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: IRONSCALES seems to be preferred by users due to its ease of setup, excellent artificial intelligence, and automated detection and response capabilities.
"Threat Explorer is an invaluable tool for me, and it plays a crucial role in helping me discern the origins of various email campaigns, pinpointing where they emanate from, and identifying the individuals within our organization who are affected."
"The initial setup was easy."
"There are several features that I consider valuable."
"The risk level notifications are most valuable. We get to know what kind of intrusion or attack is there, and we can fix a problem on time."
"I would say that 90% of the spam and phishing attack emails get blocked right off the bat."
"The benefit that stands out to me is the ability for multiple individuals to collaborate simultaneously within the same document. Additionally, there is the option to save the document directly in the integrated OneDrive or SharePoint."
"Does a thorough job of examining email and URLs for malicious content."
"The product's scalability is good."
"The malicious URL scanning, as well as the anti-malware features, have been really useful for us in our environment."
"The tool has a DLP solution which we can implement. Its database is updated regularly."
"The most valuable feature is the different content filters we are using, such as DKIM."
"We like the in-built features, like the email filtering based on the IP and domain. Cisco has its own blacklisted domains and IPs, which is very good. This filters around 70 percent of emails from spam, and we are seeing fewer false positives with this."
"It provides good IT assistance."
"The system enables end users to manage their own whitelists/blacklists."
"Users were able to do a check by themselves on quarantined emails. They could check if a valid email had been stopped, if it matched up with the SPF certification."
"I can customize the configuration and policies."
"The biggest benefit is that we get fewer phishing and spam emails, so using IRONSCALES has made our environment much safer."
"The report function through Gmail is probably the most valuable feature. The next most valuable features are simulation and training."
"I would say the most valuable feature is what they call Themis. It's like a virtual analyst that uses the decisions that system admins make to generate a score for whether an email is legitimate, spam, or phishing. It gets better based on the decisions that we make over time. The automation piece is great as well. The integrated approach of email security combined with employee awareness training is excellent."
"AI-driven phishing detection and incident remediation are valuable. It saves time from having to do manual analysis and investigation, and we also get alerts for phishing emails."
"The fact that it is set-and-forget is valuable. Once you turn it on, you very rarely have to micromanage it, whereas, with a lot of spam filters, you have to go in very often."
"The stability is good."
"Their anti-phishing platform is absolutely fantastic. The automated AI piece is amazing, and their technical support is fantastic."
"The solution captures a bit more of the unknown, quantifies it, and applies intelligence to it to pick out and stop a lot of phishing emails that come through."
"Several simulation options are available within 365, and the phishing simulation could be better."
"Configuration requires going to a lot of places rather than just accessing one tab."
"Too many false positives and lacks an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites."
"You should be able to deploy Defender for every subscription without the need to add servers."
"I'd like some additional features any product can give me to protect our environment in a better way."
"Microsoft should provide more documentation for users so they can self-educate. I would like to see more documentation for advanced security features."
"The only thing they should improve is the licensing model. They should stop changing it. A year ago, the five features I mentioned were included in one product. Now, three of them are bundled into one product, and you have to pay extra for the other two. I don't mind paying extra, but I don't want them to change it every year or every six months. I need to know what I'm looking at and not worry about it next year."
"Microsoft sometimes has downtime, and we'll get several incidents coming in back to back. We have a huge backlog of notifications, many of which may be false positives. However, there might be serious alerts, so we can't risk dismissing all of them at once."
"The user interface could be updated."
"I have some frustrations with the user experience in the interface, specifically with regard to making a list of people for whom I want to allow email access."
"The solution does not have a strong outbound service. It should also integrate DLP."
"I am not satisfied with the solution's reporting and logging."
"Scalability has certain shortcomings and needs to be improved because there are service providers who provide better scalability.v"
"The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky."
"We have occasionally had hardware problems because we are using an appliance-based solution, but that might change. We may consider going to virtual systems."
"Licensing is quite complicated for a number of customers, including ourselves."
"The only thing that I could say is that some of the reporting features could be better."
"There is a feature called Account Takeover, which isn't what I want it to be able to do. I know that they're working on that, but when they first started the Account Takeover feature in incident management, it didn't have much information. It didn't have any usability to it. I already had tools in place that were better."
"The simulation and training piece could be improved by having more granularity in terms of scheduling how campaigns are run and allowing people to directly take the training rather than having to go through an official campaign. That's not available yet."
"Even though they have been continuously improving it, it is not 100% there. We have had a few incidents where legitimate emails were getting blocked, and we had to manually remove those emails from quarantine. It is 90% effective or accurate because, on rare occasions, some emails from customers were not getting delivered. In one or two instances, their emails got blocked by IRONSCALES, and we had to manually remove the emails from quarantine. I would like them to improve their algorithm to avoid flagging genuine emails as malicious. I would also like to be able to whitelist certain email addresses. I'd love to be able to whitelist a particular customer."
"Its UI could be improved. My pet peeve with a lot of these cloud-based systems is that a lot of times, the interface for the management is a little clunky. If you live and breathe IRONSCALES all day long, you'll obviously know where everything is just from muscle memory, but the system is not designed for people to be in it all day long. You're only supposed to occasionally look at it. When things get moved around, it is not necessarily that intuitive. I'm an IT guy, and I can pretty much take the worst UI and figure it out, but the menus and the options in the interface could be a little cleaner graphically. If you have a quick problem that you want to resolve, it takes a little bit of digging in the admin console, whereas it should take a few clicks up front."
"In addition to integrated training, they should also have personalized training that you don't have to do as part of a phishing campaign or a simulation."
"The integration with Google Suite needs to be better. it's something they can work on."
"There's room for improvement in the campaign management. IRONSCALES has many built-in templates that I use, but you can also build templates from scratch. However, the interface for creating custom templates needs to be updated."
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Cisco Secure Email is ranked 2nd in Email Security with 56 reviews while IRONSCALES is ranked 3rd in Secure Email Gateway (SEG) with 11 reviews. Cisco Secure Email is rated 8.4, while IRONSCALES is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Email writes "Has effortless spam control, improves security posture, and frees up our IT department's time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IRONSCALES writes "It has an easy installation that can be done in a matter of minutes". Cisco Secure Email is most compared with Trellix Collaboration Security, Fortinet FortiMail, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Proofpoint Email Protection and Kaspersky Security for Mail Server, whereas IRONSCALES is most compared with Avanan, Sublime Security, Perception Point Advanced Email Security, Proofpoint Email Protection and Barracuda Email Security Gateway. See our Cisco Secure Email vs. IRONSCALES report.
We monitor all Email Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.