We compared Cisco Secure Email and Fortinet FortiMail across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Cisco Secure Email offers advanced protection against phishing attacks, reputation-based filtering, and robust tracking functionalities. Fortinet FortiMail is highly praised for its simplicity, intuitive interface, and smooth compatibility with other Fortinet products.
Room for Improvement: Cisco Secure Email should improve global malicious email defense, data loss prevention, and integration with third-party solutions. Fortinet FortiMail requires enhancements in integration, user management, and documentation.
Service and Support: Cisco support is generally considered knowledgeable and helpful, but a few users reported slow response times and difficulty navigating the support process. Fortinet FortiMail is considered to have a moderate and fair setup cost, which is seen as reasonable.
Ease of Deployment: Cisco Secure Email is generally straightforward and seamless to set up. It provides a modular and adaptable environment, but new users may need training. The setup process for Fortinet FortiMail is described as relatively easy and can be completed within a few hours or up to 14 working days. It is flexible and can be tailored to specific needs, although it may require help from technical professionals.
Pricing: Opinions on the pricing of Cisco Secure Email are mixed. Some find it expensive but worth the investment, while others find it reasonably priced and competitive with other vendors. Fortinet FortiMail is considered to have a moderate and fair setup cost, which is seen as reasonable.
ROI: Cisco Secure Email's return on investment is influenced by factors such as use case, organization size, and industry. Fortinet FortiMail provides enhanced email communication, decreased spam, stabilized collections, and altered expenses.
Comparison Results: Cisco Secure Email is highly regarded for its intelligence threat detection, reputation filtering, and robust tracking abilities. The solution’s areas for improvement include data loss prevention and third-party integration. Fortinet FortiMail and Cisco Secure Email have distinct features and functionalities. Fortinet FortiMail is known for its simple setup, user-friendly interface, and effective email filtering. It can be customized and seamlessly integrated with other Fortinet products.
"Since we have started using the solution, there have been fewer compromises."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is the ease of use."
"The good part is that you don't have to configure it, which is very convenient."
"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."
"Does a thorough job of examining email and URLs for malicious content."
"The technical support is good and quick to resolve issues."
"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."
"It's flexible. There are a lot of rules and policies that can be easily applied for certain employees or certain mailboxes."
"This solution provides some benefits, like comfortable access to TAC support. You get prompt support when working directly with Cisco."
"Because we scan products, and there is a lot of critical data, security is very important in these cases."
"The filtering is definitely better at catching both spam and malicious messages, and there's a lot of extremely granular ability for setting up rules. You can do it the way you want to. The Microsoft solution tends to be pretty limited in how it allows some of that to be done."
"The product blocks spam emails."
"It is doing its work. It is doing what it was actually designed to do. It has ensured we don't have business email compromises, and it has also ensured that our brand Galaxy is unique all year round."
"The advanced phishing protection and the integration with the awareness tool that Cisco has embedded into the solution to bring awareness to the customers about the dangers of phishing attacks and other things that come from email are the most valuable features."
"The most significant enhancement we've gained is in terms of security through the upgrade we received."
"The user quarantine feature in the solution is good...It is a stable solution."
"Fortinet FortiMail is a complete product addressing mail security concerns. It helps to know spam subscriptions and create restriction policies."
"After implementing FortiMail, the spam, and malicious emails we receive have significantly reduced, making it much simpler to manage."
"It actually filters the compromised emails when on a network layer itself."
"Clean user interface and good sandbox."
"FortiMail is extremely flexible and very easy to learn. Compared to other email security products that we've tried, it is mainly the ease of configuration that makes FortiMail valuable to us."
"The solution has a user-friendly interface. It is easy to deploy and handle. You can easily troubleshoot the issues of the solution."
"It has a very high level of security through special licensing with solutions like FortiGuard, sandboxing solutions in the cloud, and URL rewriting solutions."
"You should be able to deploy Defender for every subscription without the need to add servers."
"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."
"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."
"I'd like some additional features any product can give me to protect our environment in a better way."
"Microsoft wants its well-paying customers to finish testing some of its half-baked products, find bugs, and report bugs back to Microsoft's team, which is a little frustrating for those who have to manage it and roll it up to thousands of people across the organization."
"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."
"The product must provide better malware detection."
"The XDR dashboard has room for improvement."
"They can do it better with web links, with the URLs. They have a technology called Outbreak but it doesn't work as well as we would like."
"I would like more functionality and how to use it for Level 2 type staff. The biggest issue is it needs to be easier to use and navigate."
"Better dashboards and more interactive overviews would be nice, but the current functionality is sufficient."
"The reporting functionality needs to be improved."
"The user interface is a bit complex."
"If you are not a technical guy, it is hard to maneuver, but as soon as you work on it, it gets better and better. If there was a better way to know how to do things or how to find things, it would be good."
"They could improve the filters. In my time at the company, there were several times we had to contact support to update the filters."
"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."
"Improving the upgrade process, making it more user-friendly, and simplifying the management of hardware components could enhance the overall user experience and appeal of Fortinet's email security solution."
"The support could be faster because we've been receiving complaints from customers, they say that when they raise a ticket, it doesn't take 24 hours to respond, sometimes the support responds after three days. This is a lot of time."
"The solution's pricing is flexible and can be adjusted for African utility companies. Microsoft often offers special pricing formulas for African governments and organizations and it is similar to Fortinet FortiMail. In my country, government institutions receive discounted pricing from Fortinet FortiMail."
"The product should work on licensing and provide more detail once the license is selected for the customer."
"There are features that other solutions have that this one is lacking, such as reporting options. I hope in future releases they advance their features list."
"It can be easier to configure or connect to the cloud to report on the attachments."
"The Ui isn't that intuitive."
"The infrastructure could be improved."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Secure Email is ranked 2nd in Email Security with 55 reviews while Fortinet FortiMail is ranked 5th in Email Security with 54 reviews. Cisco Secure Email is rated 8.4, while Fortinet FortiMail is rated 8.6. 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 Fortinet FortiMail writes "Good GUI and configuring security policies is easy but the pricing needs improvement". Cisco Secure Email is most compared with Trellix Collaboration Security, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Proofpoint Email Protection, Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense and Trend Micro Email Security, whereas Fortinet FortiMail is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Barracuda Email Security Gateway, Fortinet FortiMail Cloud, Proofpoint Email Protection and Trend Micro Email Security. See our Cisco Secure Email vs. Fortinet FortiMail report.
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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.