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Avanan vs TitanHQ SpamTitan comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

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
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (10th)
Avanan
Ranking in Email Security
15th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (11th)
TitanHQ SpamTitan
Ranking in Email Security
14th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (10th), Office 365 Protection (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is 15.4%, down from 21.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Avanan is 4.0%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TitanHQ SpamTitan is 1.4%, 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.
Robert Melendez - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhances email security and has a very simple and easy-to-use UI
Spam protection is the most valuable feature. We have implemented the tool to enhance our email security. It helps prevent phishing attacks. The anomaly detection capabilities are baked into the security platform. The product integrates wonderfully with Microsoft 365. It's built right on a cloud platform and works almost natively. The solution has a very simple and easy-to-use UI. The tool appears extremely powerful and has a good solid feature set. It catches things that are bad for my environment. The user interface is good the way it is. If the solution continues down that path, I see no problems with the way it is going. It feels like a mature product.
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

"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a stable solution."
"It gives us visibility into threats and, for endpoints, it helps us to prioritize threats. We used to have a lack of visibility, but now our time to detect and respond has decreased."
"Since we have started using the solution, there have been fewer compromises."
"Our customers are satisfied with Defender for 365 because Microsoft products are easy to use and customize to meet the client's needs. Everything is in one place, so we can adjust policies as needed for phishing, DLP, ATP, or any other security features that our clients want to apply."
"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."
"There are several features that I consider valuable."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 facilitates efficient management and updates through the cloud. We do not have to worry about incompatibilities. It just works."
"Defender for 365 is a comprehensive cloud-based solution. The value of the cloud is that you aren't alone. Threat intelligence and analytics are shared in the cloud. We don't have to find the solution alone. If you face an unknown threat with traditional solutions like Trend Micro and Symantec, you need to open a case and send your information to them to analyze forensically and identify the source of the attack."
"Email Attachment Protection detects any insecure files and quickly blocks them to prevent the spread of viruses to other secure documents."
"The most valuable feature of Avanan is its effectiveness. When scanning incoming emails for threats it can in an automated fashion, quarantine suspicious attachments."
"If we look at four to five years ago, we had close to six or eight people click a link in an email per month. Now, we are probably down to about five or six clicks a year, if not less."
"Spam protection is the most valuable feature."
"When we don't understand some functionalities, the customer support staff responds fast to our calls and provides immediate action."
"The ease of installation and the AI capacity of the product are valuable."
"It can detect corrupted files and filters out documents with viruses."
"Easy to use for non-technical users."
"We are satisfied with the performance and spam filtering provided by TitanHQ SpamTitan. The reporting feature and customizations as per our requirements are also good."
"Its simplicity is most valuable. It does what we ask it to do. The filters work, and we are able to set the levels and give the clients or end-user access to the quarantine through a simple email."
"We really like the fact that we get a quarantine report because we can identify for ourselves which emails we want to keep and which we want to get rid of. It also gives us the option of directly allowing emails, which we really like. That way, the next time we get such emails, they're not blocked."
"The key differentiators of the product for an MSP are its ease of use and effectiveness. It generates reports and makes things easy for IT to manage. It's a set-it-and-forget-it type of solution."
"I've been pretty pleased with technical support. They're pretty responsive. They answer quickly. They come up with solutions really quickly as well."
"The solution keeps a copy of inbound and outbound messages for a period, which is a handy feature. It makes it easier to determine precisely what is happening with an email, where it came from, why it isn't routing correctly, why it is or isn't being flagged etc. If an end user forwards us a problematic email, the header information can be lost, making it harder to figure out what's happening."
"SpamTitan is extremely easy to learn and use."
"Another nice feature is how tailored it is so that I can adjust the domain reputation score. At certain times of the year we run marketing campaigns and I can raise the score a little bit and that way we get feedback more readily. And during Christmas time, when the bad guys try to pull people in, I can turn it down and make it a little bit tighter."
 

Cons

"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."
"Too many false positives and lacks an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites."
"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."
"Several simulation options are available within 365, and the phishing simulation could be better."
"The changes to customer service, specifically the new model for support agreements, are not favorable."
"There's room for improvement regarding the time frame for retrieving emails."
"Microsoft should provide more documentation for users so they can self-educate. I would like to see more documentation for advanced security features."
"In one of the reports I can get the exact place where a vulnerable file resides. But for that, I need to explicitly go into the device and check. If they could include that file part in the report, without my having to go to the device itself, that would help."
"When sending bulky emails, the system slows down and takes a long time before it responds effectively to our requests."
"The user experience must be improved."
"The cost can be reviewed to enable SMEs to acquire it and enjoy great security features."
"The system could be designed to give corporate emails first priority due to demands."
"Sometimes it seemed like the allow list wasn't working. I've created many allow list rules however, they still seem to be blocked; the same is true with the blocked list rules."
"In Avanan, the email channel is one of the channels where data leakage happens, and they need to consider it from a DLP perspective."
"The customer service team could come up with clear tutorials on how to use this platform to help new teams."
"It is very difficult to find the required documentation."
"The only improvement that comes to mind is updates. We are technically on TitanHQ's private cloud. We are responsible for updating our platform when a new version comes out. I would personally prefer to have SpamTitan just notify me, and say, "At this specific time on this specific day, we will be upgrading you to the newest platform.""
"With SpamTitan, the false positives and false negatives seem to be higher than those with the product we had previously. The other area for improvement has to do with how to deal with false positives. If something slips through, there's no easy way to mark it as spam globally. The add-in has not been working. We haven't even deployed it to our entire organization yet because it's not working for the few in the pilot project."
"The support hours are tough for U.S.-based companies like ours, because they're in Europe. They did tell me that they're opening a support office in the U.S. There is, currently, some overlap in support, but it's difficult to get real-time support and, a lot of the time, I just need a quick answer."
"I'm not 100% sure how well they scan certain attachments."
"We have submitted requests for a feature which would be a total control panel… Our previous spam filter had that and it saved us from having to log in to the panel online, search for an email, pull it up, and figure out where it came from originally and why it got the spam score it did. That would be a huge improvement and time-saver because then we wouldn't have to be in the webpage for that."
"I'm a contractor, I get an awful lot of organizations that are spammy in nature with respect to trying to recruit people. SpamTitan is a little more aggressive than I'd like it to be with respect to filtering some of those out, especially when I'm looking for a contract."
"I believe the product is configured for the US or European market, not the Latin American market, and the scoring system is a little too strict for our market. Most companies in Latin America don't even have proper domain configuration, which can cause their emails to be filtered as spam. They might not have DMARC or SDF configuration, so we often have to change the scoring threshold to let legitimate emails through. It's not SpamTitan's fault, but the optimization isn't the greatest considering our market."
"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."
 

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."
"The license is expensive because the cost is based on the number of users."
"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."
"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 is expensive. I typically recommend it only if clients have the budget. Otherwise, I would suggest an alternative."
"The product is expensive."
"It's a user-base subscription."
"I was working in the government and it was too expensive for us to use our Microsoft products."
"The product is not the cheapest in the market."
"Avanan’s price is comparable to Barracuda."
"The pricing of Avanan is reasonable."
"Having the flexibility and modeling to do the pricing that best fits the needs of the organization is incredibly ideal. That is what Avanan does. They know exactly how many users are using it, etc. We can tune the invoicing associated with how we are using the product so we can charge it back to the shows appropriately."
"Good pricing arrangement as an SaaS offering."
"When it comes to the scalability of it, it really doesn't matter much because of the way that it is priced. You can put it on somebody who is small or big."
"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."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing are acceptable. The licensing is somewhat different; TitanHQ gives us a peak cap of simultaneous users, which they calculate as the number of email addresses viewed through so many days or weeks. That's considered our number of users, but it isn't always a one-to-one relationship, making it harder to resell. We can't say precisely that the solution costs X per month per user, but that's how we present the price to potential customers, and we just ensure we receive more than we pay to TitanHQ. The licensing hasn't caused us any problems, but it would be better if the pricing were per-user. I know that's not easy to achieve on a technical level."
"The pricing is just right."
"The price point is still of a reasonable nature. It is reasonable for the services that they offer. They are very reasonable, and that is one of the factors why we decided on SpamTitan a long time ago."
"The pricing was much more competitive than other solutions, so I was like, "Okay, let's give it a try.""
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
48%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 Avanan?
Spam protection is the most valuable feature.
What needs improvement with Avanan?
Avanan doesn't cover certain tool segments. Barracuda provides backup and retention of emails and Microsoft 365’s bac...
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
No data available
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is trusted by companies such as Ithaca College.
Bethel School District, ServiceSource, Capital Caring
De Montfort University, Scope Services, Park County School District, NRC, Quality Smith, Toyota, CarTrawler, Videotron
Find out what your peers are saying about Avanan vs. TitanHQ SpamTitan and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.