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Cisco Secure Email vs Heimdal Email Security comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Cisco Secure Email
Ranking in Email Security
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Cisco Security Portfolio (6th)
Heimdal Email Security
Ranking in Email Security
55th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Fraud Detection and Prevention (56th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Cisco Secure Email is 4.6%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Heimdal Email Security is 0.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Secure Email4.6%
Heimdal Email Security0.6%
Other94.8%
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

KS
Technical Associate Network Security at Valuepoint Systems
Email security has protected financial data and provides clear tracking for every branch message
The areas of Cisco Secure Email that could be improved or enhanced are the slowness in the console. I don't think it was a database error or something, but we feel some slowness in configuring DLP and other content filters compared to other consoles. It may have been due to on-premises, but it was much noisy at some times while configuring DLP. When we tried to configure a DLP policy, the console became much slower. In that case, we cannot see what had happened in the mail which was blocked at that time. It may take nearly an hour to get back to normal while configuring policies. That is the major issue in the product.
Melvin Ong - PeerSpot reviewer
Country Manager at PT Symcaw Solutions Indonesia
Straightforward to set up, reliable, and offers good functionality
We primarily use the solution for email security and general email management.  It's improved our productivity.  The solution works well overall. The functionality is very good.  The setup process is easy.  It is stable and reliable. It's scalable.  I don't have any specific areas that need…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Apart from the improvement needed to the filters, it was all good."
"The tool's most valuable feature in preventing security breaches revolves around the area of malware protection that the product provides."
"Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway has allowed our users to be able to concentrate on the emails that they do receive. Previously, our users had to deal with nine million additional emails across the organization, which is nearly 1,000 emails per user to have to deal with a month. That's a massive amount for our staff to deal with and probably several hours of their time. We have a lot of clinical staff, being a hospital. We want to make our staff as productive as possible. By removing a lot of that spam and phishing type emails, this allows them to do their job."
"Cisco Secure Email has strong inbound services."
"Cisco Secure Email is a budget-friendly solution."
"It blocks bulk marketing messages, graymail, spam, and provides advanced malware protection."
"The tool has a DLP solution which we can implement. Its database is updated regularly."
"It's a bit easy to handle Cisco Secure Email; it's not that difficult. For the logs, which are in PDF format, it's not hard to read them. We don't need Wireshark much to analyze the logs."
"It is stable and reliable."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"Better dashboards and more interactive overviews would be nice, but the current functionality is sufficient."
"The management features of the product are not up to date."
"I would like to see features like AI since it is currently an area that the product lacks."
"Cisco Secure Email can be improved from the administrator's point of view. Usually, you have to work with different areas, and they can try to make it easy for the administrator to use different functions."
"The graphical user interface is not user-friendly like other vendors. I find it very difficult at times to find some options on the UI."
"The configuration UI should be made more intuitive. Currently, it takes a while to understand how to do the basic configurations."
"The solution could be less expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In addition to the standard licensing, there is a cost for SMARTnet as well."
"We do annual licensing for Cisco Secure Email Gatewayand SMA together, and possibly SmartNet support. Packaged together, the cost is just under $38,000."
"Compared to Cisco's on-prem service, the cost is the same, but you don't have to pay for the hardware and you don't have to maintain the system, as far as upgrades and hardware failures are concerned. It is cheaper to operate on their cloud service than it is to operate with their on-prem service."
"Cisco Secure Email and the support are priced well. It's not cheap, but there are other solutions that offer less and cost so much. For example, Microsoft is more expensive than Cisco."
"Cisco Secure Email is more expensive than other products. I rate it a five out of ten. There are no additional costs. You only need to pay the subscription amounts."
"The licensing was all transferred."
"Cisco Secure Email is expensive, but we get what we pay for."
"The pricing for the Cisco Email Security Appliance involves recurring costs for licenses based on the contracted time frame, such as one year, three years, or five years. Renewals are required after the license expires."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Construction Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise27
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Email?
The pricing structure is good as it is user-based or email client-based, which is positive for clients.
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Email?
The areas of Cisco Secure Email that could be improved or enhanced are the slowness in the console. I don't think it was a database error or something, but we feel some slowness in configuring DLP ...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Email?
We are using Cisco Secure Email to monitor the outgoing and incoming mail traffic in our financial institute. We have nearly 900 branches all over India. We have an on-premises mail server in which...
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Also Known As

Cisco Email Security, IronPort, Cisco Email Security, ESA, Email Security Appliances
MailSentry
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SUNY Old Westbury, CoxHealth, City of Fullerton, Indra
Brother, Symbion, CPH West
Find out what your peers are saying about Proofpoint, Microsoft, Check Point Software Technologies and others in Email Security. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.