Fortinet FortiMail and Cisco Secure Email are leaders in email protection. While Fortinet is preferred for its pricing and strong antispam capabilities, Cisco stands out with advanced features and seamless integrations, ideal for comprehensive threat protection.
Features: Fortinet FortiMail offers exceptional spam detection using FortiGuard updates, inbound and outbound inspection, and sender reputation features. It also includes advanced threat detection, policy-based encryption, and integration with FortiSandbox. Cisco Secure Email provides Advanced Malware Protection, reputation filtering via Talos, and robust email content filtering, making it a powerful defense against email threats.
Room for Improvement: Fortinet FortiMail needs enhancements in integration with FortiSandbox and third-party solutions, user interface, and automation. Cisco Secure Email could improve its user-friendliness, dashboards, and licensing processes, along with enhancing phishing filters and interfaces for better user experience.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Fortinet FortiMail offers flexible on-premises and hybrid deployment options, valued for strong support despite occasional delays. Cisco Secure Email efficiently deploys in cloud and hybrid environments, with reliable support ensuring quick resolutions and technical expertise.
Pricing and ROI: Fortinet FortiMail is praised for cost-effectiveness and flexibility, providing value without additional costs, and significant ROI due to decreased disruptions. Cisco Secure Email justifies its higher price with comprehensive features and strong threat protection, ensuring high user satisfaction and robust security.
It offers cost savings compared to Cisco, which was very expensive.
Cisco's tech support can be hit or miss, depending on the engineer you get.
The support is pretty decent, with a rating of eight out of ten.
I have direct communication with Kenyan system engineers and local support in Ethiopia, enabling good support.
Mainly, they are focusing on Fortinet FortiMail and FortiAnalyzer, where the support engineers are very good.
Fortinet's technical support offers high-quality support.
The on-premises hardware is not very scalable, but switching to the SaaS offering is expected to improve scalability.
Fortinet FortiMail is scalable and can be expanded in large environments.
The scalability of Fortinet FortiMail depends on whether you are buying a virtualized license, which allows for a scalable pay-as-you-go model, or if you are buying a box.
Based on my experience, the stability of Cisco Secure Email is very strong.
This stability is consistent across Fortinet products, including FortiGate firewall.
The solution should better analyze the actual content rather than only focusing on the email header or origin.
It would be beneficial to have the functionality of the Email Threat Defense integrated into the Email Security Gateway so customers don't have to buy two products for full email protection.
The transition from on-premises devices to virtual appliances may be necessary as more organizations migrate email services to the cloud.
There are also false positives issues, especially with signed PDF attachments.
Providing comprehensive documentation on how to deploy and configure would improve the solution.
Its cost is bundled with other Cisco products.
The licensing is a mess and needs sorting out.
The pricing structure is good as it is user-based or email client-based, which is positive for clients.
Fortinet FortiMail is considered overpriced by Indian rupee standards.
The setup cost is a little bit costly.
It is highly effective in catching phishing and spam emails.
It also possesses multiple modules for spam detection, malware detection, and threat intelligence, which are valuable in categorizing emails and determining actions.
It covers everything through email, like antivirus, IDS, and IPS.
Its threat detection capabilities have been beneficial.
Fortinet FortiMail has valuable features such as on-premises deployment and click protection, and it is working properly.
Fortinet FortiMail is recognized for its effective handling of spam and phishing.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Cisco Secure Email | 5.3% |
| Fortinet FortiMail | 3.7% |
| Other | 91.0% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 22 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 18 |
| Large Enterprise | 25 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 32 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 22 |
| Large Enterprise | 15 |
Cisco Secure Email provides email security with advanced threat protection, spam filtering, and easy integration with Cisco Talos, ensuring comprehensive protection against cyber threats like phishing and malware.
Cisco Secure Email offers a comprehensive platform for organizations seeking robust email security. With advanced threat protection and seamless integration with Cisco Talos, it enhances threat intelligence. The tool provides easy-to-use spam blocking and granular policy customization. Effective ransomware, phishing, and malware protection ensures stable network performance. It includes logging and reporting features, along with Active Directory integration, delivering enhanced security without extra hardware. Although it addresses threats efficiently, improvements in synchronization with reporting tools and phishing detection are needed. Organizations find cost and licensing complexities challenging for smaller networks and seek more intuitive configuration, advanced AI threat detection, and comprehensive reporting. Enhanced support, documentation, and cross-platform compatibility are desirable for better management and scalability.
What are the most important features?In industries like finance, healthcare, and IT, Cisco Secure Email is key to securing email communications. It serves as the primary email gateway in datacenters, scanning and filtering emails to defend against phishing, malware, and spam. Many organizations integrate it with Sophos Antivirus and Talos Threat Intelligence for heightened protection. It plays a crucial role in outbound message control and data loss prevention, ensuring compliance with security policies.
As cyber attacks become more sophisticated, it is crucial for email security solutions to offer multi-layered protection. Fortinet's proven email security platform, FortiMail, is a comprehensive multi-layered threat protection solution designed to secure users from the full spectrum of email-based threats, which includes zero-day threats, credential impersonation, spam, phishing, malware, and business email compromise (BEC) attacks.
Fortinet FortiMail offers a variety of deployment models to best fit your organization’s email security needs. On-premises, private or public cloud, or hybrid email environments can be deployed and managed in-house by your team or managed by Fortinet’s data centers. FortiMail also employs virtual machines that provide robust scalability options and flexible deployment of email security infrastructure.
Fortinet FortiMail Benefits
Fortinet FortiMail provides your organization with the following benefits:
Fortinet FortiMail Benefits
Some of Fortinet FortiMail’s top features include:
Reviews from Real Users
Fortinet FortiMail stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful anti-virus tool and its robust spam protection capabilities.
Flamur P., head of security management at Ipko Telecommunications, writes, "Fortinet FortiMail has a lot of valuable features. It works great. It also has an antivirus feature. Support for Fortinet FortiMail was also great when my team wanted to block some geographic IPs, but couldn't figure out how to do it. The support team provided clear communication on how to resolve that issue. Another valuable feature of Fortinet FortiMail is spam filtering which tells you how many spammy emails you've received. Based on my current use cases, I'm happy with Fortinet FortiMail."
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