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AppRiver Email Security vs TitanHQ SpamTitan comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender for Offi...
Sponsored
Ranking in Email Security
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (11th)
AppRiver Email Security
Ranking in Email Security
24th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
TitanHQ SpamTitan
Ranking in Email Security
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (17th), Office 365 Protection (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is 13.1%, down from 19.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AppRiver Email Security is 0.9%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TitanHQ SpamTitan is 1.2%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

Tolu Omolaja - PeerSpot reviewer
Great URL scanning and attachment scanning, but I would like more proactive threat analysis
The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning. URL scanning involves an automatic scan of links and emails. When a user clicks on a link within an email, the system promptly checks the link's safety. If the link is deemed safe, access is granted automatically. However, if it is flagged as unsafe, we receive feedback and notification to caution us about the potentially harmful link. At this point, we are presented with the option to proceed or return. I have personally witnessed the system identify a few unsafe links, making this the primary advantage of using the solution. The second crucial aspect is the scanning of attachments. When an email containing an attachment arrives, we receive a notification of the new email, along with information that the attachment is being scanned for threats. This additional layer of security provides peace of mind for our organization. While Microsoft Defender for Office 365 offers numerous features, these two stand out as particularly impressive and valuable to us.
John Zupancic - PeerSpot reviewer
Pricing that is competitive, excellent technical support, and email security
They do a better job of distinguishing between what's real and what's not than most of the other solutions we've tried. They are very easy to use. We don't have as many problems with email security. They have some areas that could be improved. For example, we also use Zix email Encryption for email encryption, which was clunky and could be improved, but the email security itself has been excellent.
George Kajaia - PeerSpot reviewer
Work hours are not lost searching through spam emails to determine which emails are legitimate
In history on the reporting graph, when you are trying to search for sender by address, it won't search by domain. I could send an email from SendGrid with my domain, but with SpamTitan, if you search by that domain then it wouldn't search it. It only searches from the field, not in the envelope field. Unfortunately, mass mailing companies, like SendGrid, send email with the form address and that completely differs from the domain envelope form address. There is no way to search for the envelope form. So, I gave them an idea to improve this filtering. For example, if I have to search an email sent by SendGrid, then I am forced to search by the recipient, then find the emails marked as spam. This is quite a huge hassle. They told me that they are aware of this and will try to add it, but they haven't added it yet. I would like to implement a secondary delivery pool for mass mailings, having an alternate pool for mass mailing lists since there is only a single mail queue with SpamTitan. For example, if 10,000 emails are being sent, then the queue will be large. Unfortunately, without a secondary delivery pool, legitimate emails will wait in the queue to be delivered to my email. Therefore, I would like to have two queues: one for everyday emails and another for mass mailings. Now, I have to decide whether to buy a second SpamTitan license just for this reason because I am very satisfied with the functionality of SpamTitan overall and don't want to use another sender's appliance for this. From 2020 to 2021, there was a huge switch in the types of spam coming in. SpamTitan's anti-spam should be enabled to catch this spam. The spam catching rate went down over the last three to four years. I think this is because spammers are evolving and using different methods to send spam emails. The phishing rate of SpamTitan is not great, even Exchange Online Protection catches phishing better than SpamTitan. The most worrying are the phishing emails. I would like SpamTitan to upgrade and improve the phishing catch rate. The sandbox of the Bitdefender engine is not working correctly. They sent me an email that they pulled it because it was not working as it was intended to work. So, they are working on this as well, and maybe the sandbox will be fixed. The sandbox is for viruses. If something goes through then it is sent to the sandbox for analysis. However, I am not using the sandbox right now. I am just quarantining this type of attachment right away.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning."
"Scalability-wise, I do not think there are any issues so far."
"The stability of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is fantastic."
"The deployment capability is a great feature."
"Defender helps us prioritize threats across our organization."
"The initial setup was easy."
"It’s easy to handle integrations, and we don't need a lot of people in our IT team."
"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."
"It's easy to use and user-friendly. Users can also easily release spam emails."
"They are very easy to use."
"We get reports on blocked emails. I review them weekly to see who the heavy hitters are inside the office. We need our email addresses out there to do business, so we have sales and customer service email addresses that need to be out there. Those are the biggest targets for spam. SpamTitan cuts down the amount of spam that we receive, but it's about the same as Barracuda."
"The fact that it does exactly what it says on the box is what I find most valuable about SpamTitan. They've reduced our spam by about 99 percent."
"The safelist and blocklist are the best parts. If I've got a new contact coming in, I can safelist that domain or email address. Alternatively, I can block the domain or the email address if I'm getting harassed by someone. I like the ability to get down to that granular level if I need to block or allow an entire"
"I like SpamTitan's email sandboxing. It is very effective and blocks almost 99% of spam. It also has zero-day threat protection."
"It is way more than just spam filtering. The reason I bought it was not just to control our spam, but to stop the evil guys from sending us phishing or all sorts of harmful emails. I can see the daily or weekly reports of how many of those types of things that it stops for me."
"The granularity of the setup is most valuable. It has all the features we need from global settings to per-user settings. We are pretty happy with it."
"I like the notifications SpamTitan sends. Other products require the user to log into the system to see if something was blocked. SpamTitan sends users an email showing them any potential spam that was blocked and they can click on it to release it. It's much easier for the end-user."
"The digest and the quarantine are the most valuable features. I can go into the quarantine and see everything that was quarantined. On an individual basis, you can easily whitelist an email or address coming in, if needed."
 

Cons

"The GUI is sometimes slow to fetch the device report and could be improved."
"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."
"Configuration requires going to a lot of places rather than just accessing one tab."
"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."
"It would be better if it were more scalable. It depends on the architecture, but we would like to make it more scalable for both data centers."
"We noticed that from time to time, Microsoft's stability does have problems. Sometimes the service goes up and down. Sometimes they change without prior notice."
"You should be able to deploy Defender for every subscription without the need to add servers."
"The UI needs to be more user-friendly."
"It needs to make sure that the application is up to date with new attacks. They should also send us the demo or introductions for their new incoming features."
"Email security checks contain a small number of false positives."
"The stability of SpamTitan is equivalent to other email security solutions that I have previously used. Some of them have more bells and whistles that you can add. For example, inside the email subject line, you can put in the words encrypt secret, or secure. Then, it will automatically secure that email and send an email to the person who is supposed to receive it. They can identify it for themselves in a series of different Q&A questions. That is sometimes a deciding factor for clients."
"What would be helpful to me is an alert if there were an increase in the number of threats that have been picked up. In that case, an alert could be sent to the admin in our company, to inform us. It could say something like, "Generally, about 20 percent of your incoming emails have been threats. Now it has jumped up to 30 or 40 percent." Something like that would be beneficial."
"The inter mailbox email flow needs improvement. If you are in the same domain, it does not have the capability to transfer one email to the same domain through SpamTitan. They need an API for Office 365 which is currently being developed"
"It should have reporting capability. It has logs, which are very extensive. It catches all the SMTP connections to the servers, but when you have hundreds of domains, you need to wait for about an hour for the logs to open, and there are millions of lines. If you want to find something specific, such as an email coming or an IP connection, and you want to troubleshoot that, it's very hard. So, I would recommend building a reporting system or log viewer with some filters. Currently, it is everything or nothing."
"We had to do some stuff with eFax in order to get eFaxing to come through. Had we known that ahead of time, we could have had that ironed out before we went live. However, we just didn't realize it was going to interfere with it. After we implemented it, we realized it was interfering with some of our eFaxes, so we had to go figure out why"
"They need to keep up with the latest technology and add new features as they arise, e.g., artificial intelligence, new and improved updated lists, or new ways of tracking spam. They need to just keep up so the product is effective. Because, if all of a sudden viruses or spam starts getting through, then we might have to look at something else. However, so far, it has kept up and done a great job. So, we are happy."
"The overall GUI is utilitarian. It has a spreadsheet feel versus a nice software that is guided. I am sure they're going to improve it over time. It could look a little prettier. It needs some lipstick. They should get rid of unfamiliar words like ham and spam, helping the user to better understand what they are clicking through."
"SpamTitan is not particularly configurable. I basically have to accept their parameters for a lot of things."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution could be better by simplifying the business model of their licensing. It was hard to figure out how to get the licensing done for the environment, initially."
"Microsoft Defender is expensive. I typically recommend it only if clients have the budget. Otherwise, I would suggest an alternative."
"The license is expensive because the cost is based on the number of users."
"I was working in the government and it was too expensive for us to use our Microsoft products."
"The product is very expensive."
"It's a user-base subscription."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is an add-on to the Office license. Many customers are purchasing this solution."
"While Microsoft Defender for Office 365 necessitates pricier E3 or E5 subscriptions, the extensive functionality offered by these licenses across various Microsoft products justifies the investment."
"They're fairly inexpensive, but they're right in the ballpark of most of the other online products like that."
"I can rate it five out of ten because there are different platforms that also offer the same services for lower prices. But AppRiver is more flexible."
"We used to use FortiClient and Symantec Messaging Gateway. We didn't like Symantec's solution, but we switched because of the cost. SpamTitan was more cost-effective than either of the other solutions."
"Compared to all of the others, including the solution we used previously, SpamTitan is cheaper."
"Cloud-based solutions charge per mailbox, which isn't ideal sometimes. A company could have 300 total mailboxes and only 50 in regular use, but they would have to pay the same for all of them. I want a cloud-based solution that gives a price based on the volume of email traffic."
"It's a very good product and the pricing and licensing are exceptionally reasonable."
"For the service, the pricing is reasonable."
"As a small business, every penny is counted here... I really thought that something like SpamTitan would be more expensive, but it cost me about $70 (or about £60) a month. I'm more than happy to pay that."
"They have different packages, services, or products that they sell. I would recommend it for small businesses to larger organizations, even enterprises, but not individuals."
"The price and the licensing are fair, allowing us to make a margin on the product. We paid a one-time fee for the sandboxing feature; apart from that, it's just the standard licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Non Profit
7%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Threat Explorer is an invaluable tool for me, and it plays a crucial role in helping me discern the origins of variou...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
I don't have detailed specifics on pricing, setup cost, or licensing.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
I am generally satisfied with how it currently is. If I could improve anything, I would reduce the cost.
What do you like most about AppRiver Email Security?
It's easy to use and user-friendly. Users can also easily release spam emails.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AppRiver Email Security?
I can rate it five out of ten because there are different platforms that also offer the same services for lower price...
What needs improvement with AppRiver Email Security?
It needs to make sure that the application is up to date with new attacks. They should also send us the demo or intro...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TitanHQ SpamTitan?
Pricing is affordable. We renewed for three years, and the cost is reasonable.
What needs improvement with TitanHQ SpamTitan?
The GUI is problematic. It's a mess and absolute rubbish now. We also face issues with the settings that are not yet ...
 

Also Known As

MS Defender for Office 365
AppRiver Advanced Email Security
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is trusted by companies such as Ithaca College.
IHMC
De Montfort University, Scope Services, Park County School District, NRC, Quality Smith, Toyota, CarTrawler, Videotron
Find out what your peers are saying about AppRiver Email Security vs. TitanHQ SpamTitan and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,625 professionals have used our research since 2012.