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Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway vs Proofpoint Email Protection comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

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

Fortra's Clearswift Secure ...
Ranking in Email Security
31st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
0
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Proofpoint Email Protection
Ranking in Email Security
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (2nd), Digital Risk Protection (3rd), Office 365 Protection (1st), Secure Email Gateway (SEG) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway is 1.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Proofpoint Email Protection is 5.9%, down from 7.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Proofpoint Email Protection5.9%
Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway1.2%
Other92.9%
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

PC
Systems Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Stable, but malware needs improvement and customer support is poor
They need to improve the malware in the product. I am not satisfied with Clearswift because of the lack of customer support. The support is poor, the supplier takes a lot of time and it's expensive. We have some issues here when I contact the supplier, it takes a lot of time for them to get back to us but there's no solution. I am now looking at Symantec as a possible alternative.
Siva_Prasad - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant at Infosys
Email defenses have reduced phishing incidents and protect sensitive data across our enterprise
As things are evolving and threats develop in unpredictable ways, Proofpoint must adopt AI solutions and agentic solutions more aggressively and provide them to customers as part of service offerings. Inbuilt AI solutions would add more value and make Proofpoint a more premium choice for customers. With the help of AI solutions, agentic AI, and generative AI capabilities, the product would be more efficient than it currently is. Filtering false positives is highly challenging because it is impossible for humans to identify which emails are genuine and which are spam. Proofpoint should focus more on this area with back-end agents or other tools. Proofpoint should decide which emails are genuine and which are spam so it is not a challenge for end users. When receiving an email, end users should not have to determine whether to respond or not. Proofpoint should not release such spam emails and should strictly block such spam and spoof emails based on connection IPs. Currently, false positives occur in the product, and while this occurs in every product, it is an area where Proofpoint can focus on improving and reducing false positives. One email is enough for an end user to be deceived and lose money, so addressing this area is critical.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Ability to create your own content-filtering policies with relative ease."
"Go for it! I think it's an excellent product with great technical support."
"We use a few features for web proxy, and another feature is the email content filter and malware for our internal policy in the email content."
"A stable solution."
"Proofpoint Email Protection is a great security tool that is not only proactive but also reactive on a case-to-case basis and provides all the mature tools that can be utilized for the first layer and second layer message defense."
"Proofpoint Email Protection has improved operational efficiency, simplifying our internal processes and consolidating what used to be four or five different portals into a single, seamless login experience."
"Using Proofpoint Email Protection has significantly improved SOC analyst workloads for my customers by enhancing response times and adding value through built-in threat investigation tools."
"The best features of Proofpoint Email Protection are the advanced level of anti-spam and antivirus technology, the TAP feature that helps me scan URLs and provides URL defense, outbound filtering and prevention capabilities, and particularly the TRAP feature where I can pull out all phishing emails from all users' mailboxes in a single click."
"Proofpoint Email Protection has positively impacted my organization by advancing our email security posture."
"We've observed that we have almost 99.9% control over our emails now in an easy to configure and easy to implement solution."
"The anti-spam features are excellent on the email firewalls."
"Proofpoint Email Protection is very effective because they are very proactive, always ahead of the attackers, and were already detecting new kinds of attacks before customers thought about them."
 

Cons

"Malware needs improvement."
"FTP server and TRUST Manager functionality."
"I am not satisfied with Clearswift because of the lack of customer support."
"The scalability can be improved, and the solution can be optimized."
"The downside is I feel the vendor support is a little lacking and should be more responsive."
"Filtering false positives is highly challenging because it is impossible for humans to identify which emails are genuine and which are spam."
"Sometimes it doesn't detect actual spam emails, and sometimes it catches normal emails."
"I feel Proofpoint Email Protection can be improved by providing a better user experience."
"As an enterprise, we have high demands on the services, and if we have to wait for something like a week or weeks, it is not acceptable; we need solutions in one or two days sometimes because if there is spam going around, you cannot wait weeks."
"Proofpoint Email Protection could improve the Mail Trace feature and make navigation easier."
"Proofpoint Email Protection could improve by allowing more customization of the reports, such as exceptions and black-and-white lists."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I rate the price of Proofpoint Email Protection a four out of five."
"It is multiple times more expensive, which made it very much less attractive."
"It is on a yearly basis. Their floor for SMB doesn't matter. The user count is 100 users and below at $2,500 a year. Its cost is higher than other solutions. It is probably about 20% to 30% higher than what you would get with Microsoft. There are no additional costs. All costs are factored in. It can be improved pricing-wise so that it is affordable for the SMB market."
"The licensing model for Proofpoint Email Protection is simple. It's based on the number of users. Price-wise, Proofpoint Email Protection is a five out of ten because it's a pretty expensive solution."
"Customers pay around $90,000 yearly for a 1,000-user organization, with the subscription license being the main expense, apart from implementation fees."
"I rate the product price a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"Proofpoint Email Protection has comparable pricing."
"They are competitively priced, but I have been forced to get quotes for other solutions now because they haven't been responding to requests to do the work that we would like them to do."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Retailer
9%
Educational Organization
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise62
 

Questions from the Community

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What needs improvement with Proofpoint Email Protection?
The downside is I feel the vendor support is a little lacking and should be more responsive. The technical support is not up to the mark.
What is your primary use case for Proofpoint Email Protection?
I am leading this security domain, and my L1 and L2s have been using Proofpoint Email Protection and other modules of Proofpoint Email Protection for more than three years.We are currently working ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Proofpoint Enterprise Protection, Proofpoint Digital Protection
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Blocket, University of Waterloo, Lincoln Memorial University, WellSpan Health, U-Haul, Carestream Health, Westinghouse
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway vs. Proofpoint Email Protection and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
911,839 professionals have used our research since 2012.