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Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway vs TitanHQ SpamTitan 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

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)
Fortra's Clearswift Secure ...
Ranking in Email Security
39th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
0
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
TitanHQ SpamTitan
Ranking in Email Security
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (17th), Office 365 Protection (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is 13.1%, down from 19.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway is 0.8%, up from 0.5% 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.
it_user746937 - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates creation of your own content-filtering policies with relative ease
* Ability to create message bypasses for groups and/or individuals. Meaning, you do not have to "whitelist" email domains or addresses when a specific bypass will do. * Personal Message Manager (PMM): It allows users to release or delete quarantined messages. Also, allows users to add people to a Trusted Senders list. * Ability to create your own content-filtering policies with relative ease.
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 most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is data backups that we can provide through ticket requests."
"The stability of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is fantastic."
"We use Microsoft Defender for its ability to integrate with existing business technologies, which is beneficial for protecting business areas."
"The most valuable feature is protection against malicious links, fishing, and impersonation. You can train people to be aware of these threats, but they're not always careful. When they're using their phones between meetings, they click on a link, and it's game over."
"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."
"It’s easy to handle integrations, and we don't need a lot of people in our IT team."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 has improved my organization's security. It makes it easier to manage the infrastructure without the help of third-party applications."
"The good part is that you don't have to configure it, which is very convenient."
"A stable solution."
"Ability to create your own content-filtering policies with relative ease."
"The digest and the quarantine are the most valuable features. I can go into the quarantine and see everything that was quarantined. On an individual basis, you can easily whitelist an email or address coming in, if needed."
"It is a very easy product to use. There is one interface that services all our clients' health. Once learning the interface, we don't have to learn another one for each client. It is the same interface, which is valuable. Therefore, we find the single interface the most valuable since I have a very small team. I don't have one or two people dedicated to just SpamTitan. We all need to learn the interface and be fluent in it. So, having a unified single interface is a big deal for us. I don't have to teach my people five different interfaces in order to be managing a product. They use one interface for all our clients. It is a single pane of glass, which is huge for us."
"Its simplicity is most valuable. It does what we ask it to do. The filters work, and we are able to set the levels and give the clients or end-user access to the quarantine through a simple email."
"It is very simple to use. For our client, we set it up as a cluster. That is one of the benefits. You can eliminate single points of failure. We use it in a cluster in the environment where there are two gateways. Thus, if one fails, the other one keeps taking over without any disruption."
"The discovery work to resolve [issues] has gotten so much easier because we can see what's going on right at the edge of our incoming and our outgoing mail. A regular tech support dude can log in... and get a very practical view of what is going on..."
"Overall, the intuitiveness of this product is pretty good."
"We're now using SpamTitan Plus. It has an extra feature so that if you receive an email with a link, it goes to the TitanHQ server and that link is also checked. That is probably the best feature."
"I've been pretty pleased with technical support. They're pretty responsive. They answer quickly. They come up with solutions really quickly as well."
 

Cons

"There needs to be an improvement in integrating the product to work across multiple operating systems, and to have better support for non-Microsoft file types."
"Microsoft needs to broaden its global support presence by establishing teams of subject-matter experts in all regions."
"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."
"Configuration at the mid-level could be improved for the support team."
"Microsoft sometimes has downtime, and we'll get several incidents coming in back to back. We have a huge backlog of notifications, many of which may be false positives. However, there might be serious alerts, so we can't risk dismissing all of them at once."
"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."
"In some situations, it has not been able to pick impersonated emails having no attachments. Technical support definitely has a scope for improvement."
"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."
"FTP server and TRUST Manager functionality."
"Malware needs improvement."
"There needs to be improvement in response time due to the requirement of going through the ticketing system, which can cause delays."
"They could improve on the color of the interface."
"It could be improved a little bit on the speed side. When I am trying to troubleshoot a mail message that somebody is looking for in SpamTitan, sometimes setting up the filters for the quarantine is a little bit pokey."
"With SpamTitan, the false positives and false negatives seem to be higher than those with the product we had previously. The other area for improvement has to do with how to deal with false positives. If something slips through, there's no easy way to mark it as spam globally. The add-in has not been working. We haven't even deployed it to our entire organization yet because it's not working for the few in the pilot project."
"I'd like to see something like "My First SpamTitan," by which I mean, "Guide me through the things I need to set, and tell me about the things that you're setting already." That way I would get a good feeling for setting up the product, rather than having to figure it out by myself, which is what I did."
"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."
"They can increase some of the reporting around user logins. In order for us to make that determination, we have to pull down reports. They could make it a bit easier."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very expensive."
"The pricing has become expensive."
"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."
"From the pricing point of view, like any other product in the market, there is scope for negotiation."
"It is much more expensive than using another solution because we have had to include some options and upgrade our license."
"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."
"Microsoft Defender is expensive. I typically recommend it only if clients have the budget. Otherwise, I would suggest an alternative."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is an add-on to the Office license. Many customers are purchasing this solution."
Information not available
"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."
"Pricing is on par with other products, and it's reasonable."
"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."
"It's not extremely expensive. Other solutions get really pricey, really fast."
"I pay $650 per year for 50 licenses."
"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 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..."
"The pricing was much more competitive than other solutions, so I was like, "Okay, let's give it a try.""
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
13%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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.
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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
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is trusted by companies such as Ithaca College.
Information Not Available
De Montfort University, Scope Services, Park County School District, NRC, Quality Smith, Toyota, CarTrawler, Videotron
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway vs. TitanHQ SpamTitan and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
847,646 professionals have used our research since 2012.