We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Email and Symantec Messaging Gateway based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Email Security solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The product is not resource-intensive."
"The most valuable feature is the integration. It's a single console, so we don't have to switch around between multiple products. Another valuable feature is the ease of operations and maintenance."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a stable solution."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable features are safe attachments and safe links."
"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."
"Some of the valuable features on the email side are anti-phishing, anti-malware, and Safe Links."
"It also gives the vulnerability status according to the versions you have selected. Let's say you have Google Chrome. It mentions the versions it has, and it updates. Within two hours of an update, it is reflected in the dashboard. That's really nice to have."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable feature is its performance."
"The tech engineers are very knowledgeable."
"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."
"It does a great job of preventing spam, malware, and ransomware. I can only go by what people have told me and what I've seen, but I have not seen spam in a year and a half to two years in my own company mailbox. And there are not a lot of catches where it's catching something that should have gotten through, either."
"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."
"There are a lot of filters for scam emails and things like that work out of the box. You can also use the antivirus features. I like its features."
"It's flexible. There are a lot of rules and policies that can be easily applied for certain employees or certain mailboxes."
"It provides good IT assistance."
"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."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway has a good GUI, and it is very powerful in detecting viruses and spam."
"The solution is highly customizable. You can make rules for domains and configure policies for spam or malware. Messaging Gateway is an on-prem solution, so it's useful for companies without a cloud presence."
"The feature that I like the best is the fingerprinting concept."
"What I like most about Symantec Messaging Gateway is its usability. I also find its interface very friendly. The solution has a very good interface."
"The solution is excellent at blocking spam."
"The most valuable features of Symantec Messaging Gateway are advanced content filtering, malware, and antivirus defense."
"I like that it's simple and easy to configure, deploy, and manage. The reporting function has all the features we're looking for, and we are fine with that."
"The solution is "set and forget". You pay for it and everything is done for you."
"Too many false positives and lacks an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites."
"There is room for improvement with the UI."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 should be more proactive."
"They have moved features from one console to another. Things have been moved around in the interface and it takes me time to find where certain features are."
"The GUI is sometimes slow to fetch the device report and could be improved."
"There's room for improvement regarding the time frame for retrieving emails."
"The XDR dashboard has room for improvement."
"The Forged Email Detection feature needs improvement, particularly with domain. The sensors are not that good and the rules sets are unclear."
"While Cisco offers excellent solutions and innovations, the pricing may not be suitable for everyone. The cost of the software is relatively high. In the current market, there are numerous competitive alternatives that focus on security, enterprise networks, and various other aspects. Cisco, being a comprehensive provider, extends its expertise across data, servers, storage, and security, making them a preferred choice for many enterprises. However, when it comes specifically to security solutions, there are other vendors that specialize solely in this domain, offering competitive options."
"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."
"We didn't get any malware, but a few phishing emails, maybe one or two, slipped in."
"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."
"My opinion on the licensing of this solution is that it is a mess that needs sorting out. I am not particularly bothered by pricing as I administer it and make recommendations for people to buy or not to buy."
"Many smaller businesses opt for more cost-effective solutions, such as Gmail or Hotmail accounts, instead of investing in Cisco Secure Email, given its higher cost."
"We have been struggling in the last month with Cisco encryption and with the S/MIME encryption. I don't know if it is an issue on our side or if these features of the solution are not working very well."
"Messaging Gateway's advanced malware detection could be improved."
"The biggest problem is it's an on-prem product and we're trying to get out of having equipment in data centers."
"Sometimes the solution picks up false positive for viruses during scans."
"The false positive submissions must be improved."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway can improve detection because most of them are false negatives or false positives that we are trying to troubleshoot. Additionally, we are having routing problems and they are somehow connected to DNS issues."
"In a later release, it would be nice if the messaging gateway supported the cluster feature."
"It could be more scalable."
"We've had issues in the past where the user finds spam, and Symantec does not recognize it as spam."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Secure Email is ranked 2nd in Email Security with 55 reviews while Symantec Messaging Gateway is ranked 6th in SEG (Secure Email Gateway) with 20 reviews. Cisco Secure Email is rated 8.4, while Symantec Messaging Gateway is rated 8.2. 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 Symantec Messaging Gateway writes "A stable and reasonably priced solution that performs well and has a very good malware database". Cisco Secure Email is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Trellix Collaboration Security, Fortinet FortiMail, Proofpoint Email Protection and Barracuda Email Security Gateway, whereas Symantec Messaging Gateway is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Fortinet FortiMail, Trend Micro Email Security, Proofpoint Email Protection and Barracuda Email Security Gateway. See our Cisco Secure Email vs. Symantec Messaging Gateway 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.