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.
"Safe attachments, safe links, policies, and the ability to protect from zero-day threats are the most valuable features."
"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."
"At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us."
"I would say that 90% of the spam and phishing attack emails get blocked right off the bat."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable features are safe attachments and safe links."
"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."
"The product's scalability is good."
"The good part is that you don't have to configure it, which is very convenient."
"This solution provides some benefits, like comfortable access to TAC support. You get prompt support when working directly with Cisco."
"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."
"I can customize the configuration and policies."
"The added value of it is that every migration to a new version is initiated by the Cisco version itself, so that is a bunch of work that you don't have to do on the Cisco ESA system on-premise. As it becomes a safe platform, you don't need to invest anything in your own data center or in your upgrade path."
"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."
"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 tool comes with AI features. It is good for clients who already use Cisco products due to integration."
"There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails."
"The most valuable feature of Proofpoint Email Protection is the blocking capabilities, it blocks a lot of potential threats."
"They have customized security rules, mature rules, anti-virus protection, as well as email authentication similar to SPF, DKIM, and DMARC."
"The most valuable features are the business email compromise protection and targeted attack prevention."
"The initial implementation is pretty easy to handle."
"Proofpoint Email Protection's initial installation is straightforward. It took us less than a day to complete the implementation."
"It's detection of true positives are great, as it's cloud based it's very scalable and stable."
"There is no downtime."
"The setup was easy."
"The phishing and spam filters could use some improvement."
"We need a separate license and we don't know how to get the license that is required."
"One area for improvement is support, in terms of being able to reach them and, especially, technical support for configuration."
"This product's effectiveness could be improved, in terms of detecting unwanted spam or even malware between the emails, compared to other products."
"The GUI is sometimes slow to fetch the device report and could be improved."
"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 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."
"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."
"They could improve the filters. In my time at the company, there were several times we had to contact support to update the filters."
"The management features of the product are not up to date."
"There are some concerns in the way the architecture is set up, making it an area where improvements are required."
"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."
"Licensing is quite complicated for a number of customers, including ourselves."
"We have Microsoft and we have the E5 licenses, they have more EDR responses on certain emails. That's something that Cisco ESA on the cloud doesn't have. They don't do anything about MITRE attacks. They only detect if there is a malicious email or a threat and they remove it."
"There could be additional DLP functionality for it."
"I would like them to add some clustering or high availability features."
"The email DLP portion could be a bit easier."
"The Secure Mail aspect should have an Outlook add-in, instead of an external dashboard that outside users have to access."
"Proofpoint Email Protection could improve by allowing more customization of the reports, such as exceptions and black-and-white lists."
"I want Security Awareness Training in there as a package deal. A lot of companies are starting to value email security a little bit more and take it a little bit more seriously, and the great product that we link together with a lot of these sales is a training product called Security Awareness Training. It is an upsell that we do with Proofpoint, and it is definitely something that I recommend everybody with email security to look into. It would be great if Security Awareness Training is included with the email security."
"We find the cost to be prohibitive."
"You only receive one model in Proofpoint Email Protection and the other ones you have to purchase at a high price. There should be more available with the solution and additional models should be less expensive."
"Integration and filtering out who you want and don't want to have integrated ID could be improved."
"There is room for improvement in detecting and preventing phishing attacks. While the solution performs well in some aspects, it struggles with phishing threats."
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.