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.
"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."
"The most valuable feature is protection against malicious links, fishing, and impersonation. You can train people to be aware of these threats, but they're not always careful. When they're using their phones between meetings, they click on a link, and it's game over."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 has improved my organization's security. It makes it easier to manage the infrastructure without the help of third-party applications."
"Safe attachments, safe links, policies, and the ability to protect from zero-day threats are the most valuable features."
"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."
"The good part is that you don't have to configure it, which is very convenient."
"There are several features that I consider valuable."
"The initial setup was easy."
"Cisco Secure Email is a budget-friendly solution."
"The system provides our service desk with the means to troubleshoot email delivery issues with ease."
"I can customize the configuration and policies."
"Cisco Secure Email has strong inbound services."
"At one point, there was a zero-day attack. The Cisco appliance detected it and stopped it, helping us out. We avoided the attack and potential damage."
"It has the IMS engine, Intelligent Multi-Scan engine, and it does a good job, right out-of-the-box, of blocking the vast majority of things that should be blocked."
"The most valuable feature is the different content filters we are using, such as DKIM."
"Cisco Secure Email's most valuable is email certification."
"For me, the mobile app is most valuable. All other features are also very useful, but the mobile app makes it really easy for me to manage on the go. I don't have to be at my desk. I could be at the shops, or it could be in the evening when I am out, and I can get a notification on my phone that there is an incident that has been raised. I can sort it out very quickly without having to be at my work PC."
"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."
"There is buzz around phishing awareness training. When I make a campaign, all of a sudden people in our organization are talking, thinking, and wondering about it. Therefore, it keeps people on their toes. That is perfect because it does exactly what we want it to do."
"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 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."
"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."
"For what was being offered with IRONSCALES, I feel like we got an incredible deal."
"The biggest benefit is that we get fewer phishing and spam emails, so using IRONSCALES has made our environment much safer."
"Microsoft security solutions work as expected. They are constantly updating the solutions to make them better. At the same time, the changes can impact a customer's environment, and we need to adjust settings. Sometimes we aren't aware of the changes, and nothing is pushed from the backend automatically."
"The certification training for Defender for 365 needs to be deeper and incorporate Sentinel. I took all the security courses except one, and Sentinel isn't included."
"We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend."
"One area for improvement is support, in terms of being able to reach them and, especially, technical support for configuration."
"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."
"In one of the reports I can get the exact place where a vulnerable file resides. But for that, I need to explicitly go into the device and check. If they could include that file part in the report, without my having to go to the device itself, that would help."
"The visibility for the weaknesses in the system and unauthorized access can be improved."
"The user interface is a bit complex."
"I am not satisfied with the solution's reporting and logging."
"I would rate the stability a six out of ten. We had multiple issues with the stability."
"The scalability must be improved."
"It is not user-friendly, and it is quite complicated. So, it should be more user-friendly."
"The user interface needs some improvement to become more user-friendly. The graphics could be better. It's designed more for a technical user rather than a business user."
"Better dashboards and more interactive overviews would be nice, but the current functionality is sufficient."
"The graphical user interface is not user-friendly like other vendors. I find it very difficult at times to find some options on the UI."
"The only thing that I could say is that some of the reporting features could be better."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would love to see the indication of compromise and how the solution utilizes open source resources. It would be good to see that included in the paid versions. It would be a small addition but add a lot of value for clients."
"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."
"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."
"IRONSCALES should bundle more features together instead of separating them and charging additional licensing fees."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
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, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Fortinet FortiMail, 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.