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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
8.2
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (10th)
Cisco Secure Email
Ranking in Email Security
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
58
Ranking in other categories
Cisco Security Portfolio (8th)
TitanHQ SpamTitan
Ranking in Email Security
6th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
78
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (6th), Office 365 Protection (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is 15.9%, down from 20.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Email is 9.6%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TitanHQ SpamTitan is 1.8%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

Luis-Brown - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 8, 2023
Allows for easy reporting of problems, valuable anti-phishing, and anti-malware support
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 lacks proactivity in assisting us with preparing for potential threats before they occur. While they employ a substantial amount of threat intelligence to preemptively prevent incidents, their effectiveness diminishes when it comes to delivering proactive threat intelligence alerts from Microsoft. Their focus primarily revolves around managing the internal environment. On the other hand, my other vendor, Check Point, along with my membership in MS-ISAC, supplements me with this type of information. The phishing and spam filters could use some improvement. It is adequate, but it doesn't match the quality of Proofpoint or Mimecast. However, it comes close in effectiveness. Plus, if we're obtaining it for free, investing in the other products seems impractical.
Muhammad Naeemuddoja - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 14, 2023
Robust email security with advanced threat protection, seamless integration with the Cisco security ecosystem, and flexibility in deployment options
While Cisco is a preferred choice for larger enterprises, its products, especially in the realm of security, tend to be more expensive due to their advanced features. Many organizations commonly rely on Microsoft Outlook for their email needs. Transitioning to Cisco security solutions, including Cisco SecureMail, requires careful consideration and typically involves a learning stage. The decision between traditional hardware and virtual machines (VMs) for deploying solutions like Cisco Secure Mail often depends on financial considerations. VMs are generally more cost-effective compared to dedicated hardware, leading industries to increasingly favor VM deployment. The choice is particularly relevant when the server's capabilities are robust enough to meet organizational needs. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.
Pusa Alexandru-Catalin - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 16, 2024
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

"It’s easy to handle integrations, and we don't need a lot of people in our IT team."
"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."
"Since we have started using the solution, there have been fewer compromises."
"The product's scalability is good."
"The benefit that stands out to me is the ability for multiple individuals to collaborate simultaneously within the same document. Additionally, there is the option to save the document directly in the integrated OneDrive or SharePoint."
"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."
"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."
"Because we scan products, and there is a lot of critical data, security is very important in these cases."
"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."
"The malicious URL scanning, as well as the anti-malware features, have been really useful for us in our environment."
"Anti-Spam and Advanced Malware Protection are the most valuable features... and we also have the option to block Zero-day attacks."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the different content filters we are using, such as DKIM."
"The product's initial setup phase was easy."
"It is a user-friendly product."
"The product has a helpful interface."
"One of the most valuable features is that it's very straightforward. It's a really simple interface. With our previous products, you could spend a week, if not more, training on those products just to figure out the interface. With SpamTitan it took an hour or two or three, tops."
"They also let you customize it to match your organization's feel, so it looks like a product from your organization. I like when companies do that. Our city logo is on it when you log in to this system."
"SpamTitan is a product that saves us time. The less spam that you have, the more time you have because you're not digging through the mail that hits your inbox."
"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."
"SpamTitan has made it easier to manage spam. When other solutions I've used quarantined something, an admin had to manually find and release it. With SpamTitan, the end-user can monitor it themselves and release their own quarantined items. It's faster and less work."
"I've been pretty pleased with technical support. They're pretty responsive. They answer quickly. They come up with solutions really quickly as well."
"Among the features that led us to choose SpamTitan are the ability to lock down, the multiple layers of security they have built into it, the ability to scrub inbound and outbound, as well as higher-level SPF and DMARC capabilities that were not really built into our previous product."
 

Cons

"The only thing they should improve is the licensing model. They should stop changing it. A year ago, the five features I mentioned were included in one product. Now, three of them are bundled into one product, and you have to pay extra for the other two. I don't mind paying extra, but I don't want them to change it every year or every six months. I need to know what I'm looking at and not worry about it next year."
"There is room for improvement with the UI."
"One area for improvement is support, in terms of being able to reach them and, especially, technical support for configuration."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in terms of reporting."
"The certification training for Defender for 365 needs to be deeper and incorporate Sentinel. I took all the security courses except one, and Sentinel isn't included."
"We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend."
"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 reporting functionality needs to be improved."
"The interface is dated. It has looked pretty much the same for 15 years or so. It would be helpful to be able to do everything from one spot. The centralized quarantine and reporting are completely separate from policy administration."
"There could be additional DLP functionality for it."
"The area of license renewal should be improved. We normally renew our license every year. There is a feature called smart licensing, and I switched from the legacy mode to the smart licensing mode because of what I thought smart licensing does. I thought it would make licensing renewal seamless and very swift, but ever since I've switched to smart licensing, each time I want to renew my license, it is a whole lot of headache. The process is not smooth, and I had to keep calling Cisco TAC to see how the issue can be resolved. At one point, I wanted to revert back to the legacy mode, but I can't revert. Once you switch from the legacy mode to the smart licensing mode, you can't revert. They should improve on the visibility of the smart licensing mode so that it can indeed be smart and easier to use for the license renewal every year. That is one challenge."
"The solution does not have a strong outbound service. It should also integrate DLP."
"There are some concerns in the way the architecture is set up, making it an area where improvements are required."
"I would like to see sandboxing for email, where suspicious emails received by the system are analyzed through online services."
"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."
"SpamTitan doesn't allow you to customize the frequency of reports. Sometimes our users complain that they cannot control how often SpamTitan's report comes. Users get a daily report, but some would prefer a notification every time an email is quarantined."
"The SpamTitan user interface is not amazing, but I don't mind it. I know they are releasing a new one soon. I have seen it and it looks a lot better. That has been an area that needs improvement."
"There is no plugin for Outlook, which might be of an advantage so that you can just click on a link in Outlook that takes you right to your quarantine list. It doesn't have that at the moment."
"I would also like to see SpamTitan improve on its antivirus software. I believe they're using Bitdefender and ClamAV. A problem with them is that they sometimes miss Trojans and malicious sites. We have internal antivirus software as well, and when we receive emails we see that our local antivirus software has found Trojans in them."
"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."
"A lot of the other companies that I deal with have a feature that allows you to modify emails and apply signatures automatically based on linking into Azure's servers and database. That feature isn't there in SpamTitan."
"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."
"The interface looks a little dated and could be modernized."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is much more expensive than using another solution because we have had to include some options and upgrade our license."
"I know that the product is incredibly expensive."
"It's a user-base subscription."
"For large enterprise organizations, they can definitely afford it, but for small and medium organizations, they might struggle to cover the expenses."
"The product is very expensive."
"Compared to other brands, Microsoft Defender for Office 365's pricing is competitive."
"The pricing is normal. Considering its popularity, it's not overpriced."
"I was working in the government and it was too expensive for us to use our Microsoft products."
"The product's price falls on the higher side when compared to the other products on the market."
"The pricing is good."
"It is a super big router that costs a few hundred thousand dollars."
"It is a reasonably priced solution."
"There were no other costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"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."
"It is expensive. I would rate it 2 out of 10, where 1 is the most expensive and 10 is the cheapest."
"At times, we feel the pricing is a bit too high, but then, there is also room for discounts. We enjoy a lot of discounts, and that is why we are still with them. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"The product's cost is average."
"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."
"Compared to the market, its price is fair."
"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."
"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."
"Our pricing has pretty much stayed somewhat the same. Sure, there has been an increase or two that keeps up with inflation, but that is everybody. When we switched from AppRiver to SpamTitan, we saved about 20%. That is $1,000 to $2,000 a month. We went to SpamTitan and WebTitan. It was $1,000 savings a month for SpamTitan and another $1,500 a month savings for WebTitan."
"The pricing for this solution is fair, and comparable with other products."
"Its pricing is good. We've been happy with the pricing. I know that they did some extensive research, and the pricing was quite favorable with everything else that they looked at. My budget hasn't changed a whole lot over the last three to five years. It's nice to see that it has remained pretty steady. So, I am happy with the pricing. It provides good value for money."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
23%
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
23%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Real Estate/Law 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?
The pricing is reasonable since it comes integrated with our Office 365 license.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Sometimes, phishing emails manage to pass through the filter, so the system needs to enhance its phishing email detec...
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 pricing for Cisco Email Security Appliance involves recurring costs for licenses based on the contracted time fra...
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Email?
The discontinuation of physical hardware solutions is a significant area for improvement in the Cisco Email Security ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TitanHQ SpamTitan?
It's more expensive than my old solution, OnlyMyEmail. That's surprising because SpamTitan requires a minimum of 50 u...
What needs improvement with TitanHQ SpamTitan?
SpamTitan advertises anti-spam, anti-phishing, and anti-spear phishing, but it's mostly marketing. They really only d...
 

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: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.