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Cisco Secure Email vs TitanHQ SpamTitan comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Defender for Offi...
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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)
Cisco Secure Email
Ranking in Email Security
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
Cisco Security Portfolio (8th)
TitanHQ SpamTitan
Ranking in Email Security
7th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (5th), Office 365 Protection (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is 15.8%, down from 20.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Email is 9.4%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TitanHQ SpamTitan is 1.7%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

Jamie LeClair - PeerSpot reviewer
File-sharing options and ease of collaboration or meetings allow for quick collaborations and chats
I work in my company's IT department, so I use all of the products under Office 365 daily, including Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Teams, and all the other components in the product. My company can't make it through a day or go by without using the products offered under Office 365. Some of our manufacturing workers may use Office 365 a lot less, but it is still necessary for things like Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. I found Microsoft Teams to be the most valuable feature of the solution, along with all of the products and features offered under Office 365. My organization has remote workers, and we can't run the company without meetings organized with the help of Microsoft Teams.
Kostas Karidas - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps prevent security breaches but fails to improve in the area of AI
I have not noticed any impressive advanced threat protection mechanisms in the tool. I don't know if there are any AI features in the product. I don't know if there is any other technology embedded in the solution. Cisco Secure Email successfully mitigated potential email threats. My company has seen plenty of scenarios where Cisco Secure Email successfully mitigated potential email threats, spam emails, and fraudulent domains. The product is good for dealing with spam emails, and it can take care of more than 100 spam emails per day. A huge number of spam emails are monitored with the help of Cisco Secure Email. I would not recommend the product to other businesses because you need to have some kind of expertise in configuring and knowing a bit about the tool's GUI. The tool also lacks in the area of AI mechanics. If I would like to have an overview and review another solution, I would go for another product other than Cisco Secure Email. I can definitely suggest others to look at the product and review it, but I would also recommend that they compare it with the other solutions in the market. I wouldn't prioritize Cisco Secure Email over other tools. Either the support partner of the product or I take care of the tool's maintenance phase by looking into the configurations and doing some fine-tuning. I rate the tool a seven to eight out of ten.
Pusa Alexandru-Catalin - PeerSpot reviewer
Outdated user-interface and offers basic functionality, they have great marketing but only deliver the basics
I was previously a satisfied customer of OnlyMyEmail. Unfortunately, they had a significant technical failure and couldn't provide security for a week, causing them to lose their biggest client. That's when I switched to Bitdefender for email security. I used Bitdefender. But it didn't meet my needs. I used it for two years. Its technology was far inferior to OnlyMyEmail. I also looked into Censornet. However, I eventually obtained a server license for SpamTitan. Currently, I am one of the slightly happy. customer of SpamTitan. It works when it wants to, it doesn't want, it doesn't work. The main difference between SpamTitan and OnlyMyEmail was accuracy. I never saw false positives with OnlyMyEmail in the ten years I used it. It just worked as it should, and at a very low price. I'm not sure what technology they used, but it was excellent. I was paying around one dollar and something cents per email address per month.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Defender enables us to secure all 365-related activity from a single place. It gives us visibility into everything happening in Outlook, protecting us against phishing and other email-based threats. Defender helps us detect any suspicious behaviors."
"The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning."
"Does a thorough job of examining email and URLs for malicious content."
"The initial setup is straightforward. You just add the license, click it, and then you can set up the rules. It is quite simple."
"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."
"Defender helps us prioritize threats across our organization."
"At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us."
"At one point, there was a zero-day attack. The Cisco appliance detected it and stopped it, helping us out. We avoided the attack and potential damage."
"Cisco Secure Email's most valuable is email certification."
"The most significant enhancement we've gained is in terms of security through the upgrade we received."
"It has the ability to tell us, after an email has been delivered, where else it went, once it got inside. Maybe it's something we wanted it to stop and it didn't stop it, but it notified us later that it was something that it should have stopped. It can give us a trajectory of all the other places that it went internally and it can tell us what files were transferred as well."
"It does a great job of preventing spam, malware, and ransomware. I can only go by what people have told me and what I've seen, but I have not seen spam in a year and a half to two years in my own company mailbox. And there are not a lot of catches where it's catching something that should have gotten through, either."
"It provides good IT assistance."
"It blocks bulk marketing messages, graymail, spam, and provides advanced malware protection."
"It has an intuitive, clear graphical interface where you can deploy your policies and understand the overall flow. There are a lot of things that you cannot handle on the graphic interface, like message filters. For this, you need to go to a lower level where you have more power, like command line interface. So, this solution has the best of both worlds. There are not a lot of bells and whistles. It is more practical with access to most features that you can configure."
"We have had no cases of malware slipping through since we have had SpamTitan."
"I have found the feature that creates seamless categorization of emails valuable. This is most likely done by having a large database to compare and to identify what are the domains that are currently spammers."
"SpamTitan is perfectly suited for managed service providers. It's easy to use and sell. It's also straightforward to configure and monitor. In my opinion, software developers at TitanHQ did an excellent job with SpamTitan."
"The solution is not hard to manage."
"The mail scanning is most valuable. They've been very good. We've used other ones, and everything else seems to be substandard than this. The other thing that I found helpful with SpamTitan was the ability to import rules from other appliances."
"We have a lot less spam going through. Because of this, work hours are not lost searching through all the spam emails to determine which ones are legitimate. This saves our bank clients' time since they are not forced to search their inbox for legitimate emails between spams. Not a lot of spam is going through. I think time is essential and we are gaining a lot of it with this solution since a lot of emails are automatically filtered out."
"It provides security for the communication between the sender and receiver. It does the encryption perfectly. We ensure that emails are sent without any security breaches. The spam catch rate at the moment is almost 100%."
"The most valuable feature is the Link Lock, which prevents our users from clicking on links that haven't been verified."
 

Cons

"The product must provide better malware detection."
"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."
"The UI needs to be more user-friendly."
"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."
"The custom alerts have to improve a lot."
"Configuration requires going to a lot of places rather than just accessing one tab."
"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."
"We are always looking for others tools to increase automation on tasks. There can be better integration with other solutions, such as PowerPoint and email."
"The solution needs to improve its advanced phishing filters. It is very good at filtering things which have bad reputations. However, when phishing or malicious emails are new or coming from a legitimate source, we don't feel that the solution is working."
"Licensing is quite complicated for a number of customers, including ourselves."
"I would like to see sandboxing for email, where suspicious emails received by the system are analyzed through online services."
"The user interface needs some improvement to become more user-friendly. The graphics could be better. It's designed more for a technical user rather than a business user."
"I am not satisfied with the solution's reporting and logging."
"The discontinuation of physical hardware solutions is a significant area for improvement in Cisco Email Security Appliance. This decision has posed challenges as virtual appliances are now the only option, which may not be suitable for all industries. The uncertainty regarding the future of the hardware aspect of the solution is a notable concern."
"The product's GUI for the dashboard needs improvement."
"My opinion on the licensing of this solution is that it is a mess that needs sorting out. I am not particularly bothered by pricing as I administer it and make recommendations for people to buy or not to buy."
"There was a situation in which I needed to change the cloud server. From SpamTitan, I had to specify which server we were on for the integration into Office 365 and I actually only found that out because there was a problem. It would have been better if they had advised us of that first."
"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."
"The user interface is good, but it could use some improvement. There's a little bit of an issue where a certain feature is not in an intuitive spot and coexisting with another feature that has similar functionality... The UI is a little dated-looking as well."
"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. ."
"There are some minor technical aspects of the portals and management interface that could be improved, but there's nothing that prevents us from doing the job. BitDefender and similar products allow you to dive deeply into all the customers from a single console. Currently, I can only see our company on the console and not any of the customers. I have to log in somewhere else to see the customers, so that multi-tenancy is something I would like to see."
"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."
"With the geo-blocking tool, it would be nice if it listed checkboxes for all the countries and had one overall checkbox for the whole area. Right now, you have to start typing them all in, or half type them, to get the list. That's time-consuming and is one thing I don't like."
"There is room for improvement in automation; better wizards for deployment, for example."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 comes with Microsoft Windows. It is free with the operating system."
"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."
"I was working in the government and it was too expensive for us to use our Microsoft products."
"From the pricing point of view, like any other product in the market, there is scope for negotiation."
"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 pricing has become expensive."
"Compared to other brands, Microsoft Defender for Office 365's pricing is competitive."
"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."
"It is expensive. I would rate it 2 out of 10, where 1 is the most expensive and 10 is the cheapest."
"You're going to get what you pay for. If you're not willing to pay the price of Cisco, you're not going to get a product that's as good as Cisco. I don't think Cisco is overpriced, because for the last two years I've been comparing it to Microsoft and Cisco has been cheaper and given us more features."
"I rate the pricing a ten out of ten on a scale where one means it is less cost-effective, and ten means it is the most cost-effective solution."
"The solution is expensive."
"Cisco Secure Email is expensive, but we get what we pay for."
"Licensing costs depend on how many users there are. It could range between $5 and $7 per month, per user."
"It is not that costly. We pay for the solution through a contractor and pay an annual fee."
"Pricing depends on your environment and which model you want to buy."
"The pricing was a little bit below the average of what we were looking at."
"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 pricing of SpamTitan is about right. It's not over-priced per user. It's not super cheap either, but it is a very good product..."
"Compared to all of the others, including the solution we used previously, SpamTitan is cheaper."
"The pricing is very reasonable and very comparable in the industry... Their licensing structure does leave a little bit to be desired. I would like it to be easier to understand how I can add licenses and update things."
"It's a very good product and the pricing and licensing are exceptionally reasonable."
"The price was great compared to other solutions that we looked at the time."
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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
25%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
21%
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?
The pricing is reasonable since it comes integrated with our Office 365 license.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Microsoft needs to broaden its global support presence by establishing teams of subject-matter experts in all regions.
What do you like most about Cisco Secure Email?
Cisco Secure Email is a budget-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Email?
The licensing is expensive and a bit complex with the new approach Cisco has taken. It is considered more complicated...
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Email?
The primary areas for improvement are the pricing and the complexity of deployment. The pricing is considered expensi...
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
Cisco Email Security, IronPort, Cisco Email Security, ESA, Email Security Appliances
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is trusted by companies such as Ithaca College.
SUNY Old Westbury, CoxHealth, City of Fullerton, Indra
De Montfort University, Scope Services, Park County School District, NRC, Quality Smith, Toyota, CarTrawler, Videotron
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Email vs. TitanHQ SpamTitan and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.