Fortinet FortiMail vs Microsoft Defender for Office 365 comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on May 23, 2022

We performed a comparison between Fortinet FortiMail and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Reviewers agree that the installation of both solutions is straightforward and easy.

  • Features: Users of both products are for the most part very satisfied with their scalability and stability. Fortinet FortiMail reviewers like its flexibility and strong security capabilities but mention that the UI of the dashboard could be enhanced. Defender for Office reviewers say it is easy to use but would like to see additional security features.

  • Pricing: All Fortinet FortiMail users agree that it is a low-cost solution, whereas some Defender for Office users feel it is an expensive product.

  • ROI: Fortinet FortiMail users do not mention ROI. Defender for Office users report seeing an ROI.

  • Service and Support: All Fortinet FortiMail users report being satisfied with the level of support they receive. Defender for Office users give mixed reviews for the product’s support. Some users report being satisfied, while others feel the support could improve

Comparison Results: Fortinet FortiMail comes out on top in this comparison. Our reviewers agree that Fortinet FortiMail is reliable, high performing, and fairly priced. In addition, it has excellent customer support.

To learn more, read our detailed Fortinet FortiMail vs. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"This excellent email gateway minimizes spam, inspects suspicious emails and isolates infected attachments with little administrative effort.""Fortinet FortiMail is a complete product addressing mail security concerns. It helps to know spam subscriptions and create restriction policies.""When combining this solution with other Fortinet products, such as FortiGate, it integrates well and provides a comprehensive protection package.""It is a scalable solution.""The GUI isn't hard to use. When we do a demo and explain the features of Fortinet products to our customers, they understand very quickly. They can easily manage their systems without us.""The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's ability to prevent phishing attacks.""Technical support is great. They're available 24/7 and their response time is typically within the hour.""It has a very high level of security through special licensing with solutions like FortiGuard, sandboxing solutions in the cloud, and URL rewriting solutions."

More Fortinet FortiMail Pros →

"Since we have started using the solution, there have been fewer compromises.""The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning.""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.""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.""I would say that 90% of the spam and phishing attack emails get blocked right off the bat.""The deployment capability is a great feature.""Does a thorough job of examining email and URLs for malicious content.""The risk level notifications are most valuable. We get to know what kind of intrusion or attack is there, and we can fix a problem on time."

More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pros →

Cons
"Fortinet FortiMail should allow more flexibility with the content rules.""The solution could be improved by providing a virtual machine facility with a complete set of options in the VM setup.""I think the security of the product could improve.""The solution is user-friendly to a degree but the dashboard needs improvement.""Sometimes it takes a little bit too long to determine if an email is good or not. If they could shorten that time span, it'd be so much better. It does delay our email, which does not make users happy. That said, I would have to say we have not been blacklisted for quite a while now.""They should add a lot of threat-intelligence feeds from different sources - not only from one source (FortiGuard).""I think they need to look into it and improve their signatures. This will help with blocking incoming spam emails.""Such kinds of things, raised from the point from the objective actually, we are using Fortinet FortiMail. We don't find any kinds of challenge or difficulties, but Fortinet FortiMail is more efficient and more effective for us. I don't know for other client, but for us, Fortinet FortiMail is very effective Like, for instance, if it is possible, let's say some kind of high threat is actually encountered if it could be possible to SMBs in our smartphone, or mobile apps, kinds of thing, if Fortinet FortiMail is available to monitor the thing using from our mobile phone from our smartphone. If such kinds of things are truly included, it will be more or good for us."

More Fortinet FortiMail Cons →

"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 only thing they should improve is the licensing model. They should stop changing it. A year ago, the five features I mentioned were included in one product. Now, three of them are bundled into one product, and you have to pay extra for the other two. I don't mind paying extra, but I don't want them to change it every year or every six months. I need to know what I'm looking at and not worry about it next year.""The custom alerts have to improve a lot.""We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend.""There's room for improvement regarding the time frame for retrieving emails.""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.""The UI needs to be more user-friendly.""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."

More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The licensing model for this solution is better because it is based on the box and not the number of users."
  • "It is an expensive product."
  • "The annual cost is $55,000."
  • "Pricing is straight-forward and renewable without complicated pricing structures."
  • "Pricing is based on initial license purchase and use volume."
  • "In the future I would like it if there's a possibility to lower the price of the bandwidth and UTM. It is quite expensive."
  • "This is a good solution and value for the money."
  • "If you don't need the full bundle that includes everything, you have options for the small or medium enterprise environments."
  • More Fortinet FortiMail Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "It's a user-base subscription."
  • "From the pricing point of view, like any other product in the market, there is scope for negotiation."
  • "Defender is a little bit more expensive as compared to others. We are in the manufacturing environment. So, we don't have a high budget for all of our endpoint devices. Its cost is a major concern for us."
  • "For licensing, it's usually a yearly package for customers who are subscribed to Office 365, but they can also pay on a monthly basis."
  • "Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is an add-on to the Office license. Many customers are purchasing this solution."
  • "Microsoft Defender for Office 365 comes with Microsoft Windows. It is free with the operating system."
  • "The solution saves money so we have seen a return on investment."
  • "Defender for 365 comes in various plans and licenses, along with other Microsoft security solutions. Purchasing this kind of package or security bundle gives good value for money, and that's what I recommend."
  • More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:FortiMail possesses notable strengths, and one key feature is its store-and-forward concept.
    Top Answer:It could benefit from enhancing its functionality, especially in terms of advanced filtering. Introducing features such as AI-based and cloud-based filtering could significantly improve mail security… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:The product must provide better malware detection. The detection algorithms don't perform the way I hope they would.
    Ranking
    5th
    out of 107 in Email Security
    Views
    7,006
    Comparisons
    4,636
    Reviews
    25
    Average Words per Review
    497
    Rating
    8.4
    1st
    out of 107 in Email Security
    Views
    13,167
    Comparisons
    10,373
    Reviews
    28
    Average Words per Review
    653
    Rating
    8.4
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    FortiMail
    MS Defender for Office 365
    Learn More
    Overview

    As cyber attacks become more sophisticated, it is crucial for email security solutions to offer multi-layered protection. Fortinet's proven email security platform, FortiMail, is a comprehensive multi-layered threat protection solution designed to secure users from the full spectrum of email-based threats, which includes zero-day threats, credential impersonation, spam, phishing, malware, and business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

    Fortinet FortiMail offers a variety of deployment models to best fit your organization’s email security needs. On-premises, private or public cloud, or hybrid email environments can be deployed and managed in-house by your team or managed by Fortinet’s data centers. FortiMail also employs virtual machines that provide robust scalability options and flexible deployment of email security infrastructure.

    Fortinet FortiMail Benefits

    Fortinet FortiMail provides your organization with the following benefits:

    • Eliminate message-based threats by using FortiMail’s advanced inspection capabilities before they can harm your users.
    • Flexible licensing ensures that you don’t have to create a license for each user as you scale your network upwards.

    • Achieve regulatory compliance with sophisticated messaging content archiving, quarantining, and routing tools.
    • Stop spam before it takes over your messaging system and network resources, ensuring that your messaging performance remains optimized.

    Fortinet FortiMail Benefits

    Some of Fortinet FortiMail’s top features include:

    • Spam and malware prevention: FortiMail employs advanced techniques and technologies, such as outbreak protection, impersonation detection, content disarm and reconstruction, and sandbox analysis to provide users with high-performing antispam and antimalware tools designed to prevent unwanted bulk email, ransomware, and other targeted attacks.
    • Powerful data loss prevention: Identity-based email encryption and archiving help prevent the loss of sensitive and important information and ensure that your organization adheres to compliance with corporate and industry regulations.
    • Automatic updates: Receive dynamic updates from the FortiGuard subscription services that automatically upgrade your antispam and antivirus functionality using intelligence gathered by Fortinet's dedicated global threat research team.
    • Seamless integration: Integrations with other Fortinet products and external third-party components enable companies to enhance their security by sharing indicators of compromise (IoCs) across a unified security system.
    • Easy email management: Gain full visibility over real-time email traffic with Fortinet FortiMail’s intuitive dashboards, rich reporting features, centralized quarantine tools, and end-user controls. Control email traffic with the solution’s full mail transfer agent and mail-handling capabilities. The solution’s quick-start setup wizard greatly reduces the complexity of deployment and management.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Fortinet FortiMail stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful anti-virus tool and its robust spam protection capabilities.

    Flamur P., head of security management at Ipko Telecommunications, writes, "Fortinet FortiMail has a lot of valuable features. It works great. It also has an antivirus feature. Support for Fortinet FortiMail was also great when my team wanted to block some geographic IPs, but couldn't figure out how to do it. The support team provided clear communication on how to resolve that issue. Another valuable feature of Fortinet FortiMail is spam filtering which tells you how many spammy emails you've received. Based on my current use cases, I'm happy with Fortinet FortiMail."

    Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a comprehensive security solution designed to protect organizations against advanced threats in their email, collaboration, and productivity environments. It combines the power of Microsoft's threat intelligence, machine learning, and behavioral analytics to provide real-time protection against phishing, malware, ransomware, and other malicious attacks.

    With Microsoft Defender for Office 365, organizations can safeguard their email communication by detecting and blocking malicious links, attachments, and unsafe email content. It employs advanced anti-phishing capabilities to identify and prevent sophisticated phishing attacks that attempt to steal sensitive information or compromise user credentials.

    This solution also offers robust protection against malware and ransomware. It leverages machine learning algorithms to analyze email attachments and URLs in real-time, identifying and blocking malicious content before it reaches users' inboxes. Additionally, it provides advanced threat-hunting capabilities, allowing security teams to proactively investigate and respond to potential threats.

    Microsoft Defender for Office 365 goes beyond email protection and extends its security features to other collaboration tools like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. It scans files and documents stored in these platforms, ensuring that they are free from malware and other malicious content. It also provides visibility into user activities, helping organizations detect and mitigate insider threats.

    Furthermore, this solution offers rich reporting and analytics capabilities, providing organizations with insights into their security posture and threat landscape. It enables security administrators to monitor and manage security incidents, track trends, and take proactive measures to enhance their overall security posture.

    Sample Customers
    Magromer Cueros y Pieles S.A.
    Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is trusted by companies such as Ithaca College.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider19%
    Manufacturing Company15%
    Government15%
    Computer Software Company11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization43%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    Government5%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company16%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    Government6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Government7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business45%
    Midsize Enterprise30%
    Large Enterprise25%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise54%
    Large Enterprise28%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business42%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise42%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise51%
    Buyer's Guide
    Fortinet FortiMail vs. Microsoft Defender for Office 365
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Fortinet FortiMail vs. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Fortinet FortiMail is ranked 5th in Email Security with 54 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is ranked 1st in Email Security with 41 reviews. Fortinet FortiMail is rated 8.6, while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiMail writes "Good GUI and configuring security policies is easy but the pricing needs improvement". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 writes "Allows for easy reporting of problems, valuable anti-phishing, and anti-malware support". Fortinet FortiMail is most compared with Cisco Secure Email, Barracuda Email Security Gateway, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Fortinet FortiMail Cloud and Proofpoint Email Protection, whereas Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Mimecast Email Security, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Barracuda Email Security Gateway and Trend Micro Email Security. See our Fortinet FortiMail vs. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 report.

    See our list of best Email Security vendors.

    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.