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Proofpoint Email Protection vs Symantec Messaging Gateway comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 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

Proofpoint Email Protection
Ranking in Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (1st), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (2nd), Digital Risk Protection (3rd), Office 365 Protection (1st)
Symantec Messaging Gateway
Ranking in Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Secure Email Gateway (SEG) category, the mindshare of Proofpoint Email Protection is 18.0%, down from 20.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Messaging Gateway is 3.0%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Secure Email Gateway (SEG) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Proofpoint Email Protection18.0%
Symantec Messaging Gateway3.0%
Other79.0%
Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
 

Featured Reviews

Siva_Prasad - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
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.
Dennis O'Reilly - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber SecOps Principal at Dotcom Security
The product provides good content filtering options, but the false positive submissions must be improved
The tool is very stable. I rate the stability a seven out of ten. It's an on-premise application that runs on a virtual machine. It has dependencies on the hypervisor host that we're running it on. If it's not configured, the application can be influenced by it. Sometimes, there is a service stop error while the service is still running. Sometimes, the service just stops. Some policies do not act the way that we intend them to respond.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution scales quite well."
"The Tap and Trap features. They are the best features."
"Proofpoint Email Protection helped create a safe environment by blocking and preventing Active Directory harvesting attacks, imposter attacks, backscattering, spam, and malicious attacks."
"Proofpoint Email Protection has massively improved the attack surface and has limited a lot of user compromise events."
"We have a lot fewer malicious emails coming in since implementing this product."
"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."
"The solution has very strong detection for most of the phishing and malicious emails received from the outside."
"Its main defense is to stop malicious emails from coming through. There is a sandbox environment where you can open malicious or suspicious emails to make sure that they're not malicious, instead of taking the risk of having your employees do it. This is definitely something that everybody needs nowadays, especially with the rise in cyber attacks."
"The anti-malware and spam features are valuable."
"The solution is excellent at blocking spam."
"The solution is stable and the performance is good."
"Symantec is a secure product."
"It has very good capabilities for managing malware."
"Messaging Gateway is stable."
"The solution is a leader in anti-spam email products and you can block 99% of spam emails, making it very effective with great performance."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the content filtering policies because the solution offers huge options for configuration, such as hardware manipulation, et cetera, and the dictionaries make the work easier."
 

Cons

"To move to a more sophisticated email security solution was cost-prohibitive. When you compare it to others, it was too expensive."
"If I had to pick one minor thing I would like to see improved in Proofpoint Email Protection, it would be integration with AutoTask or ConnectWise because I saw a few tickets where, when there is a notification on Proofpoint Email Protection, it takes a few minutes to maybe an hour to generate a ticket with ConnectWise and AutoTask."
"Regarding improvements, the search in Proofpoint Email Protection is a bit slow sometimes; if it was quicker, it could probably improve the search a little bit."
"I think Proofpoint Email Protection could be slightly more intuitive."
"There are user interface complexities that require integration with a SOC team, which needs time and training."
"The only limitation we have with Proofpoint Email Protection is when we implement it with Google Workspace."
"Proofpoint is fairly expensive."
"Proofpoint Email Protection's interface is confusing and could be improved."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway should include better exclusions and exceptions for better administration."
"What needs to be improved in Symantec Messaging Gateway is its local partner support, as it's not as technical."
"It is a nice product but is not user friendly in terms of the graphical interface. It is poor and is not rich in terms of the human interface."
"Sometimes the solution picks up false positive for viruses during scans."
"It could be more scalable."
"Support could be better. What's also lacking when you compare it with Proofpoint and other threat protection solutions is that it does the basic stuff, but we need more advanced threat handling."
"In a later release, it would be nice if the messaging gateway supported the cluster feature."
"We've had issues in the past where the user finds spam, and Symantec does not recognize it as spam."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Proofpoint Email Protection has comparable pricing."
"The licensing cost of Proofpoint Email Protection is a lot higher than other solutions, such as Barracuda."
"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."
"Pricing has recently been increased and the cost is a downside"
"Clients pay for an annual subscription of Proofpoint Email Protection. Every client always finds it expensive."
"In general, the pricing is competitive."
"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."
"It's a bit expensive compared to its competitor Barracuda Email Security Gateway but cheaper than Sophos Email."
"They're a little costly compared to Microsoft."
"A subscription for technical support costs extra."
"For 150 users, we pay INR 1,60,000."
"The cost of Symantec Messaging Gateway is too expensive in general. However, the appliance also includes the price of the license in the same bundle."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway’s pricing is very cheap."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Outsourcing Company
19%
Construction Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise62
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Proofpoint Email Protection?
To improve Proofpoint Email Protection, I suggest breaking down the URL into one versus three different GUIs. Regarding Proofpoint Email Protection's AI capabilities, I think its governance and sec...
What is your primary use case for Proofpoint Email Protection?
My main use case for Proofpoint Email Protection includes phishing emails, spam, URL isolation, and training. I utilize the email protect portal to ensure that none of our employees in any of the b...
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Also Known As

Proofpoint Enterprise Protection, Proofpoint Digital Protection
Symantec.cloud, Symantec Email Security.cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blocket, University of Waterloo, Lincoln Memorial University, WellSpan Health, U-Haul, Carestream Health, Westinghouse
Doric, Joblink Plus, Our Lady of Mercy College, Parramatta, PPB Advisory, Slater & Gordon Lawyers, Sydney Adventist Hospital Ltd.
Find out what your peers are saying about Proofpoint Email Protection vs. Symantec Messaging Gateway and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
912,788 professionals have used our research since 2012.