We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Email vs Proofpoint Email Protection based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: In this comparison, reviewers give similar ratings in most categories. The main difference between the two products is that the majority of Cisco users find the interface to be dated.
"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."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a stable solution."
"The product is not resource-intensive."
"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."
"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."
"There are several features that I consider valuable."
"Defender is a SaaS platform, so it offers more flexibility. Managing the permissions is easier. The solution's automated detection and response features are scalable."
"I love the Advanced Malware Protection feature. It works very well... The appliance has more security such as SDF, DKIM, DMARC, and encryption."
"It integrates with Active Directory and we can limit specific users to using specific applications."
"The tool comes with AI features. It is good for clients who already use Cisco products due to integration."
"Spam controls are excellent because they are a powerful feature that operates almost effortlessly."
"Anti-Spam and Advanced Malware Protection are the most valuable features... and we also have the option to block Zero-day attacks."
"It's a bit easy to handle Cisco Secure Email; it's not that difficult. For the logs, which are in PDF format, it's not hard to read them. We don't need Wireshark much to analyze the logs."
"It blocks bulk marketing messages, graymail, spam, and provides advanced malware protection."
"It has the ability to tell us, after an email has been delivered, where else it went, once it got inside. Maybe it's something we wanted it to stop and it didn't stop it, but it notified us later that it was something that it should have stopped. It can give us a trajectory of all the other places that it went internally and it can tell us what files were transferred as well."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to remove bad messages that were delivered, prior to being classified as unwanted."
"The solution blocks malicious emails containing viruses and malware and reduces them out of spam."
"A one-stop shop for email protection"
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature is the option to edit the inbound security."
"The most valuable feature of Proofpoint Email Protection is the central location dashboard for viewing all the related information for risk."
"The most valuable features of Proofpoint Email Protection are ease of use, data loss prevention, antivirus, and spam protection."
"URL scanning and online relay service are the most valuable features of Proofpoint Email Protection."
"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."
"The GUI is sometimes slow to fetch the device report and could be improved."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 could improve by giving customers information on techniques to prevent threats. For example, information about best practices on how to protect their own devices against hackers and scammers, such as educational information or training. This would help others have a better understanding of cyber security. Additionally, there can be more security features added."
"The visibility for the weaknesses in the system and unauthorized access can be improved."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 must improve the overall management style, including the GUI. It also needs to change the filters so that it is easy to whitelist and blacklist data."
"Configuration requires going to a lot of places rather than just accessing one tab."
"The UI needs to be more user-friendly."
"I would rate the stability a six out of ten. We had multiple issues with the stability."
"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."
"It is not user-friendly, and it is quite complicated. So, it should be more user-friendly."
"Cisco Secure Email can be improved from the administrator's point of view. Usually, you have to work with different areas, and they can try to make it easy for the administrator to use different functions."
"The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky."
"The solution needs to improve its advanced phishing filters. It is very good at filtering things which have bad reputations. However, when phishing or malicious emails are new or coming from a legitimate source, we don't feel that the solution is working."
"Typically, in a phishing email, they try to use a name everybody's going to recognize, like the CEO's name or the CFO's name... With this appliance, the way it's designed at the moment, for us to really stop that with any level of confidence, we have to build a dictionary of all the names of the people we want it to check, and all the ways they could be spelled. My name would be in there as Phillip Collins, Phillip D. Collins, Phillip Dean Collins, Phil Collins, Phil D. Collins. There could be eight or 10 variations of my name that we'd have to put in the dictionary. There's no artificial intelligence to say "Phil Collins" could be all these other things, and to stop phishing from coming through in that way."
"In future releases, I would like to see two main improvements come to mind. First, the current solution requires maintaining two separate operating systems for FTD, which can be cumbersome. I'd love to see a single operating system for the FTD box."
"The solution could lower its price."
"The initial setup is complex."
"They do not have an on-demand scan for the internal viruses and internal users, and they don't have a scan for the exchange server against viruses and spam as Symantec does."
"Pricing for the platform could still be cheaper."
"The solution should add post-sales training."
"The incident reporting on offer needs to be improved. It's lacking right now. It should be on the platform somewhere."
"Unfortunately, the whole product is going downhill right now, ever since they were sold to Thoma Bravo. We're constantly having problems with stability and the product in general."
"Proofpoint should have better integration with complex environments that need more than one instance of Proofpoint, as there are issues with nested instances."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Secure Email is ranked 2nd in Email Security with 55 reviews while Proofpoint Email Protection is ranked 1st in Secure Email Gateway (SEG) with 44 reviews. Cisco Secure Email is rated 8.4, while Proofpoint Email Protection is rated 8.4. 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 Proofpoint Email Protection writes "A reasonably priced product that offers protection to emails, along with spam filters". Cisco Secure Email is most compared with Trellix Collaboration Security, Fortinet FortiMail, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense and Trend Micro Email Security, whereas Proofpoint Email Protection is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Fortinet FortiMail, KnowBe4 and Barracuda Email Security Gateway. See our Cisco Secure Email vs. Proofpoint Email Protection 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.