Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs Perception Point Advanced Email Security comparison

Cisco and Fortinet are both solutions in the Email Security category. Cisco is ranked #26 with an average rating of 7.3, while Fortinet is ranked #18 with an average rating of 8.7. Cisco holds a 1.1% mindshare in Email Security, compared to Fortinet’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Fortinet users who would recommend it.
Cisco Secure Email Threat D...
Read 16 Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense reviews
  • 1,071 Views
  • 1,039 Comparison Views
93% willing to recommend
Perception Point Advanced E...
Read 25 Perception Point Advanced Email Security reviews
  • 2,543 Views
  • 2,111 Comparison Views
100% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report
Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense and Perception Point Advanced Email Security are competing products in the email security arena. Perception Point tends to have the upper hand due to its advanced threat detection with integration across multiple cloud platforms, despite Cisco’s strengths in pricing and support.

Features: Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is known for its robust email filtering, threat intelligence, and integration with Cisco Talos Threat Intelligence sources. Perception Point stands out with its advanced threat detection, ability to identify malicious and phishing content, and its multi-engine architecture for comprehensive email scanning.

Room for Improvement: Cisco can improve on its advanced phishing detection capabilities and cloud readiness. Perception Point could enhance its configuration ease and feature set for managing internal traffic and potentially increase the granularity of its threat intelligence.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense offers straightforward deployment with extensive customer support. Perception Point is praised for seamless cloud-based installation, quick integration, and effective incident response, providing an efficient deployment experience.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense provides a cost-effective entry point and notable ROI with its cost-efficient solutions. In contrast, Perception Point may have higher initial setup costs, but its advanced features typically lead to substantial ROI by minimizing risks and enhancing protection over time.

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE REPORT
To learn more, read our detailed Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Perception Point Advanced Email Security Report (Updated: December 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Perception Point Advanced Email Security
December 2025
Download the complete report
Helped 881,082 peers since 2012

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

Cisco Secure Email Threat D...
Ranking in Email Security
26th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Perception Point Advanced E...
Ranking in Email Security
18th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is 1.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Perception Point Advanced Email Security is 2.2%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Perception Point Advanced Email Security2.2%
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense1.1%
Other96.7%
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2541525 - PeerSpot reviewer
reviewer2541525
Principal Cyber Prevent and Defense Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Clawback feature performs well but analytics and integration capabilities need improvement
The integration capability with other threat intelligence platforms is not optimal, as I have experienced difficulty in sending logs to our SIEM. Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense's flexibility could be enhanced while it mostly integrates with cloud solutions, but not on-premise. The behavioral analysis capability of Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is not particularly helpful for identifying new, evolving threats within my company, as it keeps flagging legitimate emails as malicious. Regarding room for improvement, the significant number of false positives should be addressed. The solution does not adapt to behavioral analytics and does not make changes when it sees a pattern.
Read full review
GC
GraftonCole
IT at a retailer with 11-50 employees
Provides strong email protection and accurate threat detection with effective multi-layer defense mechanisms
They run us through about seven layers of protection, and the reporting is excellent. I found it to be very effective. It has a very high level of protection with Perception Point Advanced Email Security. They continually modernize their surveillance. They use a lot of AI. They run it through several layers of detection, deep packet inspection, which takes a lot of horsepower. I just think it is a good system. Perception Point Advanced Email Security has helped address specific email threats within my organization. I get weekly reporting, and by doing that, I can go and talk to these people directly and make them aware of how many attacks they had and where the attacks are coming from and not only the source of the email, but what category of emails that they are receiving. With the combination of KnowBe4 PhishER, I think it is a good security process that we have in place.
Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This solution is easy to use."
"On ease of use, it rates very high. It's something that I was able to get into without really looking at any documentation. I wanted to see what it felt like before I started looking at any documentation on how to use it, and it was very easy to use. It works very smoothly. The user experience is very intuitive. They did an amazing job on that."
"It's very easy to deploy and configure."
"Secure Email Threat Defense's scalability is good."
"The ability to see east-west traffic is its most valuable feature. Traditionally, email defense focuses on north-south, inbound-outbound, egress-ingress traffic. With Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox, it's able to quickly identify, track, tag, and categorize emails that are internal. That can typically give us visibility into if there's an internal compromised account (for example). Someone can then use that internal compromised account to email additional accounts with either malicious software or links, but internal within that Office tenant. Effectively, that email message never leaves the tenant. Any of the mail gateways really do not have any method or way of seeing this traffic since it's not leaving the environment."
"The features and functionalities are much better than Microsoft's in-built Defender plan."
"Cisco has a threat mechanism called cloud-based Talos, where all the threats are inbuilt."
"Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense's best features include user management of graymail, enhancing security awareness by allowing users to manage cold calls, sales-based items, and ensuring email compliance."
More Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense pros
"The solution is used to block malicious items hidden inside a document or PDF file."
"The most valuable feature of Perception Point Advanced Email Security is the filtering and securing of emails."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable feature is the hardware-assisted platform module."
"One is the hardware-assisted platform that provides more insight into the threat scenarios. And the other is their instant response team's availability, 24/7, for identifying and responding to incidents. These are the two main things that everyone likes."
"It has modules to detect malware and that is a strong point. It has a very nice way of showing you, directly in the product, a lot of details about certain pieces of malware. It goes very deep and even shows you the assembly code. It also does detonations on files and shows you the results in different operating systems. That is very useful."
"Perception Point Advanced Email Security has a correct price point and offers very good email filtering capabilities."
"Their security engines are very effective at stopping malware and potential attacks before they reach a user's mailbox. They have the best detection engine."
More Perception Point Advanced Email Security pros
 

Cons

"There is still room for improvement in terms of integrations with other Cisco tools and non-Cisco tools. There is also some room for improvement needed in terms of the reporting."
"The behavioral analysis capability of Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is not particularly helpful for identifying new, evolving threats within my company, as it keeps flagging legitimate emails as malicious."
"The physical appliance has been discontinued, although the platform still exists."
"Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox can improve by adding advanced phishing, then the solution would become the best in the market. However, this could increase the price even more. Additionally, if CES with domain protection could be added it would be an even better solution."
"The tool gives false positives and it needs to be more accurate. I would like to see AI as a new feature."
"From a technical point of view, Cisco is far behind in terms of cybersecurity, and it has to improve very much."
"Customers will benefit greatly from monthly billing because the majority of customers today use the cloud, be it Office 365, or Google Cloud."
"The learning curve shows that in the beginning, there are numerous false positives. For one month, we had to reclassify the false positives manually until the system learned."
More Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense cons
"It would be helpful for Perception Point Advanced Email Security to have more integration with other solutions."
"We have had a few false positives, not that many, but a few... they have a feature where someone from the Incident Response team can look at an email and mark it as 'verified malicious.' You might think that if an engine detects it is malicious, and an IR team member has flagged it as malicious, it will definitely be malicious. But that's not always the case."
"The only thing that can be improved in Perception Point is the in-depth analysis and attribution to cyberattack groups."
"Integration and end-user interaction can be improved as the current system does not allow end-users to send back information to the platform, unlike Google Workspace or competitive tools like Ironscales."
"In terms of architecture, and I know that they're going to improve this, the solution needs to be much more redundant. There was an outage a month ago in AWS, and that basically stopped the service for two or three hours. Although in two years, this was the first time that something like that happened, our expectation from a company like Perception Point is that it should work with either a multi-cloud or multi-region architecture, to improve the resilience."
"I think the interface could be improved in the next release."
"Its websites for analysis need to be a bit more approachable for people who are less technical. Technically, it is a fire-and-forget solution. So, you want to be able to implement this solution for a lot of companies who don't have security operation teams (SOCs) behind them. You need to have something where a secretary can jump onto this console and release whatever she needs to release. Therefore, it needs to be written in a very specific non-technical language."
"There is still room for improvement with BEC. There is more work to be done by Perception Point on machine learning and neuro language as well. BEC is very difficult if you don't have a computer language looking into the content of the email and trying to make a determination through that. With BEC you often don't have an attachment or a URL."
More Perception Point Advanced Email Security cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive compared to other vendors."
"The solution’s pricing is manageable."
"Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox does not have any competition with Sophos, Trend Micro, or other vendors of the world. However, there is a pricing premium for the solution. One has to look at it from that angle that while they are buying Cisco, there will be a premium, and Cisco justifies that premium value. That's why they're charging a high price."
"The feedback from vendors and customer is that it is expensive."
"There is room for improvement for them with an MSP partner. The pricing is good and fair. Our customers don't complain. The only thing is that it's a little bit old school. They don't have a system that automatically checks the number of users that our customers have so we can just update the licenses ourselves through a website. It is still done manually. They have a person who checks invoicing monthly to determine if there have been any changes. A nice improvement would be if they could get automated licensing counts."
"Pricing is lower in comparison to Proofpoint."
"We would always like it to be cheaper and save more money. However, we are getting the value from it."
"We were able to get reasonable pricing that matches the ROI we want, so I think that it is the correct price point."
"The pricing and licensing are very fair compared to competing companies in the same field."
"If a user only wants protection for email, then the price of the product is okay, but if they opt for the collaboration options offered by the product, then it becomes a little expensive."
"The pricing compared to the value Perception Point brings is super-competitive. They're not the cheapest in the market, but the value and the quality of the product are superior to anything else in the market, so we don't mind paying more for it."
"The pricing is not cheap, but I can see the value. In security, if you are trying to save by giving up quality, that's a very bad decision."
More Perception Point Advanced Email Security pricing and cost advice
report
See which vendors are best for you
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Email Security solutions are best for your needs.
See recommendations
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Secure Email Threat Defense?
Comparatively with other products, the pricing of Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is normal. As a technical guide, I am not very aware of the pricing details.
See all answers
What needs improvement with Secure Email Threat Defense?
We have deployed Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense in two customer environments. It is still in development as a new product. Some customer requirements, such as sending logs to a Syslog server, ar...
See all answers
What is your primary use case for Secure Email Threat Defense?
We are working with Cloud Mail Gateway and on-premise mail gateways. We have worked with Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Perception Point Advanced Email Security?
In Brazil, the dollar price affects the cost. Perception Point Advanced Email Security is about 50 percent less expensive.
See all answers
What needs improvement with Perception Point Advanced Email Security?
Perception Point Advanced Email Security can be improved by increasing the speed of analysis and delivery. In some cases, we have trouble with multi-factor authentication emails, which take more th...
See all answers
What is your primary use case for Perception Point Advanced Email Security?
My main use case for Perception Point Advanced Email Security is proactive defense against advanced threats, particularly phishing, zero-day attacks, and malware that a standard filter might miss. ...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

Cisco Secure Email vs Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense Logo
Cisco Secure Email vs Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Compared 30% of the time
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense Logo
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Compared 16% of the time
Abnormal Security vs Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense Logo
Abnormal Security vs Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Compared 14% of the time
Proofpoint Email Protection vs Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense Logo
Proofpoint Email Protection vs Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Compared 12% of the time
Kiteworks vs Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense Logo
Kiteworks vs Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Compared 11% of the time
More Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense Competitors
Fortinet FortiMail vs Perception Point Advanced Email Security Logo
Fortinet FortiMail vs Perception Point Advanced Email Security
Compared 12% of the time
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs Perception Point Advanced Email Security Logo
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs Perception Point Advanced Email Security
Compared 9% of the time
Mimecast Email Security vs Perception Point Advanced Email Security Logo
Mimecast Email Security vs Perception Point Advanced Email Security
Compared 9% of the time
Avanan vs Perception Point Advanced Email Security Logo
Avanan vs Perception Point Advanced Email Security
Compared 8% of the time
Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration vs Perception Point Advanced Email Security Logo
Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration vs Perception Point Advanced Email Security
Compared 7% of the time
More Perception Point Advanced Email Security Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
January 2026
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense reportDownload Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense product report
Buyer's Guide
Perception Point Advanced Email Security
January 2026
Perception Point Advanced Email Security reportDownload Perception Point Advanced Email Security product report
 

Also Known As

Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox, Cisco CMD, Cisco Cloud Mailbox Defense
No data available
 

Overview

Cisco's secure email threat defense is designed to provide comprehensive protection against email-based threats. With the increasing sophistication of cyber attacks, it is crucial for organizations to have a robust solution in place to safeguard their email communications.

The product offers advanced threat detection capabilities, leveraging machine learning algorithms and real-time analysis to identify and block malicious emails. It scans incoming and outgoing emails for suspicious attachments, links, and content, ensuring that only safe and legitimate emails reach the users' inbox.

To combat phishing attacks, our solution employs advanced anti-phishing techniques, including URL reputation analysis and email header analysis. It proactively detects and blocks phishing emails, preventing users from falling victim to fraudulent schemes and protecting sensitive information.

The Secure Email Threat Defense also includes robust anti-malware and anti-spam features. It scans email attachments for malware and viruses, preventing them from infiltrating the organization's network. Additionally, it filters out spam emails, reducing the clutter in users' inboxes and improving productivity.

Administrators have full visibility and control over email security. They can set up customizable policies to enforce security measures, such as blocking specific file types or restricting email access from certain domains. Detailed reports and analytics provide insights into email threats and help in fine-tuning the security settings.

Cisco

Perception Point Advanced Email Security is a comprehensive solution designed to protect organizations from advanced email threats. Leveraging cutting-edge technology, it offers multi-layered defense mechanisms to detect and block sophisticated attacks such as phishing, malware, and ransomware. 

With its advanced threat intelligence capabilities, it can identify and neutralize zero-day threats in real-time. The solution also provides robust data loss prevention features, ensuring sensitive information remains secure. Its user-friendly interface allows for easy management and monitoring of email security, while its seamless integration with existing email platforms ensures a hassle-free deployment process. 

Perception Point Advanced Email Security is a reliable and efficient solution that safeguards organizations against the ever-evolving landscape of email-based threats.

Fortinet
 

Sample Customers

Luiss University, Lone Star College, T-Systems, Magyar Telekom
Information Not Available
Buyer's Guide
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Perception Point Advanced Email Security
December 2025
Free Report: Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Perception Point Advanced Email Security
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Perception Point Advanced Email Security and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
DOWNLOAD NOW
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
See our Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Perception Point Advanced Email Security report.
See our list of best Email Security vendors.

We monitor all Email Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.