Avanan is praised for its advanced threat protection, ease of integration, competitive pricing, and valuable customer support. Users appreciate the machine learning capabilities and real-time alerts Avanan provides. On the other hand, Abnormal Security stands out for its behavioral AI engine, advanced threat protection and easy integration with email platforms.
The summary above is based on 30 interviews we conducted recently with Avanan and Abnormal Security users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"Microsoft Defender has a feature to protect each and every attachment. Even if it's an encrypted attachment, it will check for any potential threats."
"Defender for 365 is a comprehensive cloud-based solution. The value of the cloud is that you aren't alone. Threat intelligence and analytics are shared in the cloud. We don't have to find the solution alone. If you face an unknown threat with traditional solutions like Trend Micro and Symantec, you need to open a case and send your information to them to analyze forensically and identify the source of the attack."
"The solution is very easy to use. All you have to do is to assign the license to the end-user and it's done. The customer will only have the feature activated, and the solution will monitor the emails to determine if they are a threat or not."
"Threat Explorer is one of the features that I very much like because it is a real-time report that allows you to identify, analyze, and trace security attacks."
"It also gives me good visibility because, with Defender, I'm using a Microsoft product to defend Microsoft products. The integration was really seamless and I have wide visibility because it picks up almost everything. Literally, I can see almost every activity that happens, from the e-mail to the workstation itself."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable feature is its performance."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a stable solution."
"I have never encountered any stability issues with Abnormal."
"What I like about Abnormal Security is that it notifies me if any of my partners or suppliers are experiencing a security breach by analyzing their database and identifying potential cyber threats."
"It does some really cool stuff that other tools aren't doing. We found it to be really effective, and the AI/ML functionality is really what differentiates them."
"Initial auto-remediation allows us to auto-remediate before the email lands in the end user's inbox for a split second."
"Ease of use is undoubtedly one of the most valuable features of Abnormal Security."
"Their ability to take things out of the mailbox and catch things much faster than users is excellent."
"The features that appeal to me most are the combination of auto-remediation and Detection 360."
"One of the things that I love about them is that the setup and installation are super easy. All you do is give them access to your Microsoft 365 tenant, and through APIs, they are able to do their work. They are doing all this through APIs, so you do not have to install the software and take a month to get it all set up to even see the value of the solution. You could be up and running in less than an hour."
"If we look at four to five years ago, we had close to six or eight people click a link in an email per month. Now, we are probably down to about five or six clicks a year, if not less."
"I highly recommend this solution to any prospective buyer."
"The most valuable feature of Avanan is its effectiveness. When scanning incoming emails for threats it can in an automated fashion, quarantine suspicious attachments."
"It can detect corrupted files and filters out documents with viruses."
"It is simple to deploy this platform and interact with the set features."
"Email inspection has saved many employees from spam attacks and viruses from unauthorized sources."
"Easy to use for non-technical users."
"I like Avanan's SmartDLP module. It's seamless, and the administrative overhead is low. We aren't a very sophisticated operation. We just want to reduce our exposure, so we find ThreatCloud helpful. Avanan's acquisition by Check Point was beneficial for them."
"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 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."
"You should be able to deploy Defender for every subscription without the need to add servers."
"In some situations, it has not been able to pick impersonated emails having no attachments. Technical support definitely has a scope for improvement."
"The GUI is sometimes slow to fetch the device report and could be improved."
"We noticed that from time to time, Microsoft's stability does have problems. Sometimes the service goes up and down. Sometimes they change without prior notice."
"The product must provide better malware detection."
"They can improve their security in a way where a customer can know if all their attachments are safe or not to open through a report. The solution does its job perfectly, but it never reports to the customer whether those attachments have been stopped before or not."
"I would like to have the ability to customize the auto-remediation feature."
"The pricing for academic institutions and student mailboxes is challenging."
"One feature I'd love to see is outbound scanning."
"I, as such, do not have anything that I do not like or would like to add, but you could argue that because they are doing it API-based, there is a chance that something could slip through temporarily before they are able to pull it out. In theory, it could happen just because of the nature of the system. They are not in line with the delivery of the mail. They are kind of asynchronous, which is a pro as well as a con. If it is synchronous, then I know it would always stop them, but because it is asynchronous, things could get through temporarily or because of some system issues on the Microsoft side or their side. It is the nature of the beast, but it is a little bit of a con."
"The biggest pain point for us is the lack of support for on-premise email systems."
"When we're working on something as engineers, and we find an idea or a method of doing something that would be greatly improved by doing it another way, there should be an ability for me to click the ideas button, type in an idea that I have, and submit it to a product review team or developers to have them think through the process a little bit more."
"There could be room for improvement in enhancing integration with other cybersecurity tools."
"The ideal scenario would be for Abnormal Security to work in tandem with Microsoft to analyze incoming emails."
"The overall user interface is not attractive. It needs some improvement."
"When sending bulky emails, the system slows down and takes a long time before it responds effectively to our requests."
"The customer service team could come up with clear tutorials on how to use this platform to help new teams."
"It is complicated for new users unfamiliar with the modern cloud networking infrastructure."
"Familiarization with performance for new teams may take a long time."
"The unified dashboard that it displays needs some improvements in terms of the KPIs that they have."
"Avanan doesn't cover certain tool segments."
"It should reduce the amount of time needed for thorough scanning."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
Abnormal Security is ranked 12th in Email Security with 8 reviews while Avanan is ranked 6th in Email Security with 21 reviews. Abnormal Security is rated 9.6, while Avanan is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Abnormal Security writes "Provides comprehensive email security management, effective in detecting a wide range of email threats". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Avanan writes "We've noticed a significant decline from people accidentally or intentionally clicking on things". Abnormal Security is most compared with Mimecast Email Security, Egress Intelligent Email Security, Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security, Cisco Secure Email and Sublime Security, whereas Avanan is most compared with Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration, IRONSCALES, Perception Point Advanced Email Security, Mimecast Email Security and Fortinet FortiMail. See our Abnormal Security vs. Avanan report.
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