Fortra's Agari and Abnormal Security offer advanced email threat protection, with Fortra focusing on real-time email monitoring and reporting capabilities while Abnormal Security focusing on its behavioral AI engine to analyze email activity and identify anomalies that deviate from normal user behavior. Fortra's pricing structure is highlighted for its transparency and affordability, while users praise Abnormal Security's efficient customer service. Both products deliver on their promises, providing significant value and ROI to their users.
The summary above is based on 15 interviews we conducted recently with Fortra's Agari and Abnormal Security users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Defender enables us to secure all 365-related activity from a single place. It gives us visibility into everything happening in Outlook, protecting us against phishing and other email-based threats. Defender helps us detect any suspicious behaviors."
"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 most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is the ease of use."
"Safe attachments, safe links, policies, and the ability to protect from zero-day threats are the most valuable features."
"I like its investigation capabilities, as that is what is most important to me. It is fairly simple with a user-friendly interface."
"Since we have started using the solution, there have been fewer compromises."
"At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us."
"The technical support is good and quick to resolve issues."
"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."
"The features that appeal to me most are the combination of auto-remediation and Detection 360."
"I have never encountered any stability issues with Abnormal."
"Their ability to take things out of the mailbox and catch things much faster than users is excellent."
"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."
"Ease of use is undoubtedly one of the most valuable features of Abnormal Security."
"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."
"Initial auto-remediation allows us to auto-remediate before the email lands in the end user's inbox for a split second."
"It comes with a lot of helpful tips for complicated areas."
"I am impressed with the tool's discovery capabilities which help me find out who is sending the emails on the company's behalf. I also find the ability to detect and generate reports on phishing emails a valuable feature."
"If spam or some kind of malicious email gets past Mimecast and gets into our email environment, we can go into Agari and we can search for it."
"It is really important for large companies to have the brand protection that is provided by Agari."
"We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend."
"There's room for improvement regarding the time frame for retrieving emails."
"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."
"There needs to be an improvement in integrating the product to work across multiple operating systems, and to have better support for non-Microsoft file types."
"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."
"You should be able to deploy Defender for every subscription without the need to add servers."
"Too many false positives and lacks an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites."
"The visibility for the weaknesses in the system and unauthorized access can be improved."
"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 pricing for academic institutions and student mailboxes is challenging."
"I would like to have the ability to customize the auto-remediation feature."
"The ideal scenario would be for Abnormal Security to work in tandem with Microsoft to analyze incoming emails."
"There could be room for improvement in enhancing integration with other cybersecurity tools."
"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."
"One feature I'd love to see is outbound scanning."
"The product's user interface is clunky. We have difficulty in finding what we need. I would also like to see automation in the onboarding processes."
"Some customers in the financial sector do not like the cloud solution because they don't want data to be transferred to a US-based cloud."
"The protocol is quite complicated, which may not be something that could be improved, but it would be better if it was simplified."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
Abnormal Security is ranked 10th in Email Security with 8 reviews while Fortra's Agari is ranked 27th in Email Security with 4 reviews. Abnormal Security is rated 9.6, while Fortra's Agari is rated 8.6. 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 Fortra's Agari writes "Helps to detect and generate reports on phishing emails and saves from email compromises ". Abnormal Security is most compared with Mimecast Email Security, Egress Intelligent Email Security, Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security, Avanan and Cisco Secure Email, whereas Fortra's Agari is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Cisco Secure Email, Valimail Monitor and Mimecast Email Security. See our Abnormal Security vs. Fortra's Agari report.
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