Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration vs Varonis Platform comparison

Check Point Software Technologies and Varonis are both solutions in the Data Loss Prevention (DLP) category. Check Point Software Technologies is ranked #5 with an average rating of 9.0, while Varonis is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.0. Additionally, 98% of Check Point Software Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Varonis users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration and Varonis Platform both focus on enhancing security, but Varonis often receives more favorable reviews for its comprehensive data access governance. Check Point Harmony is preferred for its integration with collaboration tools like Microsoft Office 365 and competitive pricing. Varonis, although viewed as expensive, is considered worth the cost by large enterprises due to its advanced threat management features and robust data protection.

Features: Check Point Harmony provides strong real-time prevention and centralized management to secure emails and collaboration tools from threats like malware and phishing. It integrates seamlessly with cloud services like Microsoft Office 365 and offers extensive dashboard monitoring. Varonis specializes in data access and governance, giving granular insight into sensitive data interactions. It effectively manages and prevents unauthorized access, offering valuable threat discovery and classification capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Check Point Harmony could improve by enhancing user interface intuitiveness and the customization of email handling policies. Small to medium businesses often cite pricing and technical support quality as areas for growth. Varonis faces challenges with its high pricing and complex interface. Users often suggest better licensing model flexibility and improved cloud infrastructure support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Check Point Harmony offers flexible deployment options suitable for hybrid environments and integrates well with various cloud platforms. Its customer service receives average ratings, with some users experiencing inconsistent support responsiveness. Varonis is primarily geared towards on-premises deployment, with user feedback indicating a need for enhanced cloud capabilities. Support experiences vary, with some users feeling the service provided is below par.

Pricing and ROI: Check Point Harmony is generally seen as offering good value for money with flexible licensing options, often resulting in a tangible ROI through enhanced email security. Varonis requires a substantial financial investment justified by its deep data governance and security benefits, suiting enterprises needing robust protection, although it might not fit smaller companies' budgets.

To learn more, read our detailed Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration vs. Varonis Platform Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration vs. Varonis Platform

April 2025

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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

Cloudflare

Featured Reviews

Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Rahul Kamble.

Business Director at One Networks

Offers complete detection and simple management and is a user-friendly solution

It's very effective as a solution to prevent mobile app threats. It has a mobile MDX, mobile detection, and response session. As a comprehensive solution, Check Point offers a very granular and best-in-class experience. Compared to competitors like Fortinet, Trend Micro, Palo Alto, and Cisco, Check Point provides a superior solution according to both the MITRE and Gartner frameworks. For example, in a recent attack simulation, Check Point only allowed ten malicious emails through, while Fortinet allowed 1500 and Cisco allowed 1800. Check Point's email attack ratio is nearly 0.10%, while others range from 1% to 3%. This demonstrates Check Point's superior email filtering capabilities. Check Point's email cleaning ratio is 99.9%, significantly higher than the 98%, 95%, or 93% of its competitors. Moreover, Check Point Harmony Email incorporates AI technology within its security features. Harmony Email & Collaboration (HEC) provides full protection and addresses zero-day files. It's the best solution available, as others don't offer protection against zero-day attacks and rely on signature-based solutions. HEC is truly the best option.

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Frederic Delos

Senior Cloud Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Offers the ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data

The most effective feature for me is its ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data, provided you have access, to determine whether it's a false positive or a true positive. That's the best thing for me, out of all of it. It's got everything, like other ones, but I like to be able to look at something if I'm doing forensics on the alert and say, "Okay, do I really need to do something with this?" For example, we don't want sensitive data in our OneDrive. So it identifies the sensitive data that's possibly in the OneDrive. And what I can do is look at it and identify whether it's actually sensitive data in Datalert or whether it looks like sensitive data, but I know it's a false positive. If it is a false positive, I can basically say ignore this pattern based on X, Y, and Z, you know, whether it's Redjax or keyword proximity. So I like that. With other tools, I gotta go through a whole process because it's a little bit more complex. Here, I can tag it and bag it in one shot. And the next good time I scan, it slips over it. So it helps in that.

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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 Cloudflare is that it has a free version. They give us the free version with the anti-DDoS features and also the load balancing solution."

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"The solution is very good at mitigating threats."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is external DNS. It is also very secure. They have their own main server and once you configure it, the product takes care of everything. There are no issues in resolving IPs and low latency is also present."

"The most valuable feature is its usability."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

More Cloudflare pros

"It is the collaboration between users inside the company. It is a big advantage with Check Point to be able to work together on the same document."

"The most valuable feature is the sandboxing feature. It provides a sandboxing environment where you can open links and see where they lead. You can see what is presented in the link after opening it."

"The initial setup is easy."

"The setup is very easy. I haven't faced any complexity with the setup of the solution."

"For Threat Prevention, I was impressed with this feature and the solution's effectiveness. It has been very good."

"It helped us to bring security compliance and ensure system robustness throughout."

"The first most remarkable thing is the integration with the Office 365 solution, which is easy, fast, and totally transparent for the user."

"The product is a fairly complete and centralized solution accessible through the Infinity Portal."

More Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration pros

"I also appreciate the reporting feature, which allows for the extraction of various reports based on specific needs. These reports can be used for audit purposes, such as tracking changes in file locations or deletions."

"Technical support from Varonis is rated as nine out of ten."

"The solution has significantly improved data security and compliance posture by allowing us to track and monitor activities. We can see who accesses data and when files are created and understand what's happening in our environment."

"The analytics would have to be our most valuable feature."

"There's also a 90-day policy where if a user is not using the warehouse, it will automatically delete that username."

"The 24/7 support is the most valuable feature. They have been able to answer support questions pretty quickly."

"Varonis offers robust data access governance, allowing us to understand which sensitive data exists and who has access to it."

"The telemetry to capture everything and the reports are very easy to configure without having a developer degree."

More Varonis Platform pros

Cons

"Latencies are always a problem."

"We are a product integrator and reseller, and we would like to have a better partner relationship, similar to a channel sales relationship. Sometimes we are on our own or get diverted by Cloudflare because they have direct sales, which competes with us and makes it difficult to build a relationship with this company since we want to be an MSP or a managed service provider for the solution."

"Support response time could be improved."

"There might be helpful if there was some web application firewall feature."

"It would be beneficial for us if Cloudflare could offer a scrubbing solution. This would involve taking a snapshot of my website and keeping it live during a DDoS attack, ensuring uninterrupted service for our users. DDoS attacks are typically short in duration, and having Cloudflare maintain the site's availability from its secure network would enhance the overall user experience. I would appreciate it if Cloudflare could consider implementing this feature. Many organizations already utilize similar capabilities in their CDN platforms, where a static snapshot of the web page is displayed during DDoS attacks. In terms of features, Cloudflare needs to enhance its resilience and stay more focused on adopting new technologies. For instance, solutions like F5 XC Box, Access Solution, and Distributed Cloud Solution have impressive features, and Cloudflare should strive to match and exceed those capabilities. There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features. Cloudflare should prioritize enhancements in areas such as behavioral DDoS and protection against SQL injection attacks, considering the prevalent trend of public exposure to the internet for business reasons. Overall, Cloudflare needs to invest more in advancing its feature set."

"Cloudflare does not have an on-premise solution. If they had different approaches they could be better suited to accommodate more customers, such as on-premise and hybrid deployments. For example, hybrid deployments would be useful where you could move the traffic from the enterprise to the cloud."

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

More Cloudflare cons

"They could help us be integrating features with solutions from third parties."

"We still get some false positives. There are times when legitimate stuff gets flagged and it could be that somebody is expecting a very important email but they don't end up getting it. On the flip side, when we alert Check Point about stuff like this, it is corrected, so they are improving. That's a plus."

"It would be nice to see them expand their collaboration capabilities to include other suites and integrate with lesser-known products."

"I have learned enough to make the product stable. However, the stability has some challenges."

"The cost is a little bit expensive."

"There is a need for improvement in handling business email compromise."

"Since the portal to the management and administration entry sometimes has performance problems and takes a long time to respond to what has arrived, the handling of the tool is difficult."

"Check Point has to continue refining the intelligence engine to minimize the number of false positives."

More Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration cons

"It is significantly complex."

"The remediation process can be improved. There will be no existing permission group for the McAfee channel domains. We can create a new permissions group for the required folder."

"Varonis requires more access permissions for its core functions compared to competitors, which can be a concern for companies about data safety."

"There is one thing that if I add something manually, I get so many alerts. That's the biggest bad thing."

"I'd like to see automatic updates for this solution. Currently, it's a manual process to update all the keywords"

"I would like it to have cloud integration."

"The solution's interface is a little complicated with regard to setting up filters and reports."

"Varonis requires more access permissions for its core functions compared to competitors, which can be a concern for companies about data safety."

More Varonis Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the pricing is competitive. I think as far as licensing is concerned it's pretty straightforward because it's based on domain. It's just that sometimes domains could be tricky with some customers."

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

"The price is reasonable."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"The product's pricing is cheap."

"I believe their performance has improved, but I'd like to refrain from discussing the pricing aspect related to the cloud. The pricing, in my opinion, could be simplified, and I think they should consider reevaluating the pricing for support, as it can be quite high. At times, this cost can make it challenging to choose CARFAGuard or opt for the support."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"The tool is a premium product, so it is very expensive."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"Usually, we pay for the licensing part on a yearly basis and not on a monthly basis. If Check Point's team is providing a good amount of discount, then it is very easy for us to select it since its competitors are also giving the best prices or best discounts."

"You can get CloudGuard as part of Infinity. When you do the solution through Infinity, it's a per user type of license cost."

"This is a very good product if you are on the cloud, but the price is a little more expensive."

"Do a full feature evaluation (interactive) with a support person. That is what I did."

"One of the nice features is that the licensing model is elastic, so if you go over your license count, you can add users during your billing cycle and true-up later."

"Cost is the main concern that every customer takes into consideration, and Check Point always negotiates a price that is affordable."

"I'm in this business as a system integrator, so I need to suggest Check Point to some customers who are comparing products. I sell Check Point, Fortinet, and Palo Alto solutions. In terms of licensing, this solution is quite competitive but very costly. For someone looking at security as a primary concern, they should only invest in Check Point. For a customer who is looking at security combined with pricing, Check Point might not be the core solution for them. In today's market, customers are looking for effective security with efficient pricing, and Check Point is not suitable for these types of customers."

"The product is expensive compared to some competitors, especially for the SME segment."

More Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration pricing and cost advice

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."

"You could do a subscription, where you pay yearly, or you could purchase it outright. The licensing cost is based on the number of users on the system that you are monitoring."

"The platform is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."

"The pricing is good. It neither expensive nor cheap. It is average."

"It's expensive, kind of, really expensive."

"Licensing is on an annual basis. Maintenance and renewal fees are separate. Varonis Datalert is quite expensive."

"Varonis Platform wasn't certainly the cheapest solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?

Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Check Point Harmony Email & Office?

The pricing is lower compared to what I used before.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Check Point Harmony Email & Office?

We are using Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration to protect our organization from phishing attacks. For exa...

See all answers

What do you like most about Check Point Harmony Email & Office?

The product offers good and easy integration capabilities with other products.

See all answers

What do you like most about Varonis Platform?

The solution has significantly improved data security and compliance posture by allowing us to track and monitor acti...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Varonis Platform?

Varonis started as an on-premises solution and is transitioning to cloud. It hasn't fully moved yet, which is an area...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Varonis Platform?

The primary use case for Varonis Platform is data discovery, specifically for discovering sensitive data in our organ...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 50% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Imperva DDoS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration

Compared 18% of the time

Mimecast Email Security vs Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration

Compared 13% of the time

Barracuda Email Protection vs Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration

Compared 9% of the time

Cisco Secure Email vs Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration

Compared 9% of the time

Avanan vs Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration

Compared 8% of the time

More Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration Competitors

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Varonis Platform

Compared 17% of the time

BigID vs Varonis Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Cyera vs Varonis Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Wiz vs Varonis Platform

Compared 6% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon vs Varonis Platform

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

May 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration

May 2025

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration report

Download Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration product report

Buyer's Guide

Varonis Platform

April 2025

Download Varonis Platform product report

Also Known As

Cloudflare DNS

Check Point CloudGuard, Check Point CloudGuard SaaS , Check Point Harmony Email & Office

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Overview

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.

Cloudflare benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

- Faster load times

- Robust DNS security

- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)

- Free universal SSL

- Image enhancement

- Automatic browser caching

- Next-generation cloud load balancer

- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

- Rate limiting

- Minification

- Zero-trust capabilities

- Cost-effective

- Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from real users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company

Cloudflare

Check Point Harmony Email and Office is a cloud-based software offering complete protection to stop malware attacks through emails. The software is designed to provide protection for organizations using Office 365, G Suite, Google Workspace, and all other collaboration and file-sharing apps. Access permissions can be granted and custom policies can be defined for any user of choice.

Check Point Harmony Email and Office identifies and blocks advanced malware, phishing, and ransomware attacks in real time before they reach the user’s inbox. In turn, this also helps protect sensitive business data from breaches. Harmony Email and Office was the first solution to implement machine learning, API, and AI for email security, and will ultimately prevent any attempts at account takeover via agentless multi-factor authentication.

What is Complete Protection?

Check Point Harmony Email and Office offers a superior catch rate for collaboration apps and cloud email with their API-based solution that detects attacks that other solutions miss, including account takeover, supply chain attacks, ransomware, and BEC. The complete protection offers:

Malware Protection - Recognized by NSS Labs as “most effective in breach prevention,” the solution leverages technologies to bring clean files to users within 1.5 seconds. In addition, enterprises can be safer as the solution prevents malicious messages and files from reaching the user’s inbox.

Data Leakage Protection - Any confidential or sensitive information will be marked and have a classified suffix added to the end of the message or file to help keep those materials safe. Those files are encrypted, and the user will be alerted to any attempted breach of those messages.

Phishing Protection - Before advanced phishing attacks reach the end user, Harmony Email and Office detects and blocks them, including outbound, inbound, and internal communications.

Account Takeover Protection - After a user connects their cloud app, the solution captures the user's history and creates a profile and a custom threat profile. In the event of a suspected account takeover, threat intelligence is leveraged through millions of Check Point-secured gateways and endpoints and is blocked.

Reviews from Real Users

Check Point Harmony Email and Office offers a revolutionary prevention solution to stop malware attacks through emails. Users particularly like its visibility and the ability to protect sensitive business data.

David U., a CISO at IMC companies, notes, "It provides visibility of events, what's going on with the environment, what we're missing with our other solution, and the user behavior."

Mantu S., a senior technology architect at Incedo Inc., writes, "We are able to protect sensitive business data and maintain regulatory compliance with advanced data leak prevention (DLP)."

Check Point Software Technologies

Varonis Platform specializes in network security and data monitoring with modules for alerting, data classification, and access management, benefiting environments like Microsoft 365.

Varonis is designed to secure data by auditing and tracking data movement. It leverages data alert and classification modules to identify and manage sensitive information. The platform enhances network security by alerting users to unexpected data modifications and deletions, crucial for effective data loss prevention. It supports unstructured data management, ensuring proper data access and permission controls. Known for its 24/7 support, Varonis offers comprehensive analytics and unified reporting, helping prevent data overexposure and facilitating compliance efforts.

What are the key features of Varonis Platform?

24/7 Support: Provides round-the-clock assistance.
Data Monitoring: Tracks data activities efficiently.
Unified Reporting: Consolidates data access reports.
Data Classification: Identifies sensitive data effectively.
Permission Management: Simplifies managing access rights.
Behavior Analytics: Detects abnormal behavior patterns.

What benefits should be highlighted in user reviews?

Enhanced Security: Improves data protection measures.
Compliance Support: Assists in meeting compliance standards.
Data Transparency: Offers clarity in data access activities.
Access Control: Ensures proper access to data.
Centralized Remediation: Eases remediation procedures.

Varonis Platform is widely utilized in industries needing stringent data confidentiality and management, such as finance and healthcare, for tracking data modifications and unauthorized access. Enterprises deploy it to manage permissions within large datasets, benefiting Microsoft 365 environments. While Varonis requires enhancements in cloud integration, the current deployment is often based on-premises, with attention to addressing the security needs and effective data handling for critical infrastructure.

Varonis

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Helvetia, Denham Capital, Daymark Solutions, Neopharm Group

Nottingham Building Society

Buyer's Guide

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration vs. Varonis Platform

April 2025

Free Report: Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration vs. Varonis Platform

Find out what your peers are saying about Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration vs. Varonis Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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