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Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs TitanHQ SpamTitan comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

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...
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 (11th)
TitanHQ SpamTitan
Ranking in Email Security
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (18th), Office 365 Protection (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is 13.7%, down from 20.4% 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.
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 its spam filter."
"The technical support is good and quick to resolve issues."
"The product's scalability is good."
"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 email protection is excellent, especially in terms of anti-phishing policies."
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"Since we have started using the solution, there have been fewer compromises."
"The good part is that you don't have to configure it, which is very convenient."
"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."
"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 standout features include the anti-phishing feature, which is particularly advantageous as far as our clients are concerned; it was a very welcome addition for many of them."
"The key differentiators of the product for an MSP are its ease of use and effectiveness. It generates reports and makes things easy for IT to manage. It's a set-it-and-forget-it type of solution."
"The solution keeps a copy of inbound and outbound messages for a period, which is a handy feature. It makes it easier to determine precisely what is happening with an email, where it came from, why it isn't routing correctly, why it is or isn't being flagged etc. If an end user forwards us a problematic email, the header information can be lost, making it harder to figure out what's happening."
"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."
"I had server issues but I still needed to be able to look at what emails I would have received if my email server had been working correctly. SpamTitan has a reporting functionality that showed me what emails would have been sent. I could actually see the content of those emails."
"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."
 

Cons

"The phishing and spam filters could use some improvement."
"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."
"Microsoft security solutions work as expected. They are constantly updating the solutions to make them better. At the same time, the changes can impact a customer's environment, and we need to adjust settings. Sometimes we aren't aware of the changes, and nothing is pushed from the backend automatically."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in terms of reporting."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 must improve the overall management style, including the GUI. It also needs to change the filters so that it is easy to whitelist and blacklist data."
"Sometimes, phishing emails manage to pass through the filter, so the system needs to enhance its phishing email detection capabilities."
"We need a separate license and we don't know how to get the license that is required."
"SpamTitan is not particularly configurable. I basically have to accept their parameters for a lot of things."
"Specifying your own filtering rules can be somewhat tricky. You can leave it alone or add your own filter rules using regular expressions. It would be nice to get a little more help configuring the regular expressions. That is quite complicated, and it's something I struggled with."
"The product's GUI, dashboard, and speed could be better."
"The setup was a little difficult, but they did have people who helped me so I eventually got there. They had a change and my IT people had to do some stuff. There was something about pointers. I don't remember the details where we had a little trouble, but they were changing some things around."
"The documentation for how to configure it could be better. Sometimes, it was confusing. When we were onboarding with them, the documentation was a little bit vague on how to configure the DNS server and our email server."
"The only improvement that comes to mind is updates. We are technically on TitanHQ's private cloud. We are responsible for updating our platform when a new version comes out. I would personally prefer to have SpamTitan just notify me, and say, "At this specific time on this specific day, we will be upgrading you to the newest platform.""
"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."
"We had to do some stuff with eFax in order to get eFaxing to come through. Had we known that ahead of time, we could have had that ironed out before we went live. However, we just didn't realize it was going to interfere with it. After we implemented it, we realized it was interfering with some of our eFaxes, so we had to go figure out why"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For large enterprise organizations, they can definitely afford it, but for small and medium organizations, they might struggle to cover the expenses."
"It's a user-base subscription."
"It is much more expensive than using another solution because we have had to include some options and upgrade our license."
"While Microsoft Defender for Office 365 necessitates pricier E3 or E5 subscriptions, the extensive functionality offered by these licenses across various Microsoft products justifies the investment."
"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."
"From the pricing point of view, like any other product in the market, there is scope for negotiation."
"The license is expensive because the cost is based on the number of users."
"The pricing is normal. Considering its popularity, it's not overpriced."
"The approximate cost is around $7000 USD."
"The pricing is ideal. A lot of other anti-spams are integrated in Exchange, counting technical mailboxes that are not sending any emails outside. So, they are not scanned and only for internal communication. SpamTitan only counts the emails that it scans. This is one of the best licensing models that I saw for anti-spam solutions because it is counting dynamically the number of emails that senders are sending. It counts these uniquely by week. It provides a very realistic picture. This is very useful because we are not counting the emails doing inbound or outbound notifications from our company."
"The pricing is very reasonable. I know the cloud version costs more because of active 24/7 monitoring, but we take care of that as our setup is on-prem. SpamTitan is in line with what we were paying for GFI MailEssentials but works much better."
"For the service, the pricing is reasonable."
"SpamTitan has competitive pricing and flexible licensing. They allow up to 10% more that you use and then add it to the next tier of licenses."
"The pricing and licensing have been very fair. I can't complain."
"The price of this solution is low. When you do purchase everything is included in the licensing cost."
"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."
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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
21%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services 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 various email campaigns, pinpointing where they emanate from, and identifying the indi...
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.
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 developed. I wish for a return to the older GUI which was easier to use.
 

Also Known As

MS Defender for Office 365
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is trusted by companies such as Ithaca College.
De Montfort University, Scope Services, Park County School District, NRC, Quality Smith, Toyota, CarTrawler, Videotron
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs. TitanHQ SpamTitan and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,640 professionals have used our research since 2012.