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Avanan vs TitanHQ SpamTitan comparison

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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
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (11th)
Avanan
Ranking in Email Security
14th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (12th)
TitanHQ SpamTitan
Ranking in Email Security
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (18th), Office 365 Protection (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is 13.5%, down from 19.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Avanan is 3.9%, up from 3.3% 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.
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

"The technical support is good and quick to resolve issues."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is data backups that we can provide through ticket requests."
"We use Microsoft Defender for its ability to integrate with existing business technologies, which is beneficial for protecting business areas."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Defender for Office 365 has helped eliminate having to look at multiple dashboards and that is the aspect I like most about it. It is simpler, effective, and convenient. The users like the process efficiency."
"The threat detection tools enable us to ascertain malware and phishing messages across the email network infrastructure."
"Email encryption enhances end to end security of any data before it passes through the networking system."
"Email Attachment Protection detects any insecure files and quickly blocks them to prevent the spread of viruses to other secure documents."
"It can detect corrupted files and filters out documents with viruses."
"When we don't understand some functionalities, the customer support staff responds fast to our calls and provides immediate action."
"This technology is one of Check Point's acquisitions, and it is currently a powerful tool that provides all the protection that is not found in other tools."
"Spam protection is the most valuable feature."
"It can retract unsafe emails and remove them from the entire communication channel."
"The spam filtering is the most valuable part. When we first started using it, 15 years ago, there weren't many solutions that worked well, were user-friendly, and powerful."
"The overall system is straightforward to use, and the UI is excellent. It significantly streamlines the process of dealing with spam emails."
"Another good feature, related to geo-blocking, is the ability to specify exemptions. We discovered that some of our customers, even though they are located in Canada, have an Exchange Server sitting in Japan or in the Netherlands. It seems they have branches or their head office in other countries. Having this exception feature is helpful."
"What I like the most is the filtering and the granularity with which you can really zoom in on the spam that's coming in and configure it exactly so that what you don't want is blocked."
"Content filtering as well as Link Lock, which is URL parsing, are valuable, but anti-spam would be the biggest feature to help reduce overall spam for the company."
"Every client that uses it experiences a productivity boost. If somebody has to filter through 150 or 200 emails a day to find the 30 good ones, that's inefficient. If they're using SpamTitan it's making them more efficient because they don't have to go through all the junk."
"The way we can customize filters is excellent. Other solutions tend to be restrictive with their specific profiles, but with SpamTitan, we can create them from scratch."
"If it can stop all the garbage from getting through, then it is definitely a time saver. It is more protecting our employees than anything. We just want to make sure that we can do everything that we can do to try and prevent people from clicking on bad stuff or having to deal with bad stuff. It is easier to prevent it from coming into the network."
 

Cons

"One area for improvement is support, in terms of being able to reach them and, especially, technical support for configuration."
"I'd like some additional features any product can give me to protect our environment in a better way."
"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."
"About eight months ago, we started to measure the quantity of phishing and spam that we have been receiving, and it has been increasing a lot. That means that protection for our email is not as good as we were expecting."
"The pre-sales cost calculations could be more transparent."
"In some situations, it has not been able to pick impersonated emails having no attachments. Technical support definitely has a scope for improvement."
"We need a separate license and we don't know how to get the license that is required."
"The product must provide better malware detection."
"The customer service team could come up with clear tutorials on how to use this platform to help new teams."
"It should also offer a quick backup in case any email is wrongly quarantined or deleted to ensure no data loss."
"Familiarization with performance for new teams may take a long time."
"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."
"It should reduce the amount of time needed for thorough scanning."
"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 system response in a slow computing device affects performance when sending and receiving emails."
"Being cloud first and because we are in the movie business, we use a lot of Macintoshes. So, there is absolutely no reason for us to have Active Directory whatsoever. However, if you are using Office 365, you must have Active Directory in order to reset passwords. Even though we have a single sign-on provider, we must have Azure Active Directory for Office 365, which is really stupid. As a cloud application, you would think that I don't need Active Directory, which I don't need for anything else except Office 365. We have one server inside that space to help us manage Active Directory just for Office 365. This is a very sore point, but it is what it is."
"Sometimes, things can get caught back in spam that you had previously released. Without going in, releasing the whole domain, and opening it up, since you don't want to do that often because the company can get infected as well, I have a couple of things that I previously released show back up again. I don't understand why this is happening, but I would like to know why it happened, e.g., did an algorithm change? It is important to know if I released an email last week why it was caught in spam the following week."
"One of the areas that can be improved is the GUI. The product works well but finding things in the interface can sometimes be a bit difficult, just because it's so in-depth and covers a lot."
"SpamTitan doesn't quarantine when it blocks things based on the remote block list or greylisting. It just deletes the email. When I try to look at these blocked items, it tells me they're gone. RBL or greylisted items aren't saved, so you can check them. There may be a setting somewhere that I haven't seen."
"I would like to see a filter for searching inside the message content when it is quarantined."
"We are using the data center version with a dedicated server. It would be more user-friendly if SpamTitan were centralized. That is, TitanHQ should have a SaaS model for SpamTitan."
"The admin management portal needs a facelift. I've asked them for a way to authenticate admins of the organizations that want to admin the SpamTitan product itself. Adding additional management security would be a great feature. There are a few tiny improvements they could also make. For instance, the GUI itself is a little outdated, and it could be more user friendly. The same goes for ArcTitan. It's got a horrible GUI that's worse than SpamTitan. It also could use that authentication mechanism upgrade as well. I would also suggest combining the two products into one control panel. ."
"The documentation for how to configure it could be better. Sometimes, it was confusing. When we were onboarding with them, the documentation was a little bit vague on how to configure the DNS server and our email server."
"SpamTitan is not particularly configurable. I basically have to accept their parameters for a lot of things."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very expensive."
"The pricing is normal. Considering its popularity, it's not overpriced."
"The pricing has become expensive."
"I was working in the government and it was too expensive for us to use our Microsoft products."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is an add-on to the Office license. Many customers are purchasing this solution."
"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."
"It's a user-base subscription."
"Microsoft Defender is expensive. I typically recommend it only if clients have the budget. Otherwise, I would suggest an alternative."
"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."
"The product is not the cheapest in the market."
"The pricing of Avanan is reasonable."
"Avanan’s price is comparable to Barracuda."
"Good pricing arrangement as an SaaS offering."
"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."
"But the most critical factor was cost-effectiveness. SpamTitan was much cheaper than Barracuda and offered the same value."
"I don't deal with pricing. In terms of licensing, the last I heard was that the licensing for users in SpamTitan isn't fully functioning because of some integration issues with Microsoft. I know we have more than 20% on our licensing at the moment, but the way the licensing is supposed to run makes a lot of sense for us. We are looking forward to that part getting implemented correctly."
"The approximate cost is around $7000 USD."
"The product's cost is average."
"Partner profitability is good with Titan HQ's partner program. This means that I recommend it to clients who trust me. My time and effort to educate them is compensated by TitanHQ, who provides the solution to me at a lower price than what the public gets it at, then I can make some money."
"The price of SpamTitan is reasonable. It makes sense. There is no cost for me because I'm the managed service provider. The end customer pays the cost because we sell professional services to set up the whole solution, including SpamTitan and other products. Usually, it's part of a much bigger project."
"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."
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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
41%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
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: March 2025.
842,388 professionals have used our research since 2012.