We compared Cisco Secure Email and Fortinet FortiMail across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Cisco Secure Email offers advanced protection against phishing attacks, reputation-based filtering, and robust tracking functionalities. Fortinet FortiMail is highly praised for its simplicity, intuitive interface, and smooth compatibility with other Fortinet products.
Room for Improvement: Cisco Secure Email should improve global malicious email defense, data loss prevention, and integration with third-party solutions. Fortinet FortiMail requires enhancements in integration, user management, and documentation.
Service and Support: Cisco support is generally considered knowledgeable and helpful, but a few users reported slow response times and difficulty navigating the support process. Fortinet FortiMail is considered to have a moderate and fair setup cost, which is seen as reasonable.
Ease of Deployment: Cisco Secure Email is generally straightforward and seamless to set up. It provides a modular and adaptable environment, but new users may need training. The setup process for Fortinet FortiMail is described as relatively easy and can be completed within a few hours or up to 14 working days. It is flexible and can be tailored to specific needs, although it may require help from technical professionals.
Pricing: Opinions on the pricing of Cisco Secure Email are mixed. Some find it expensive but worth the investment, while others find it reasonably priced and competitive with other vendors. Fortinet FortiMail is considered to have a moderate and fair setup cost, which is seen as reasonable.
ROI: Cisco Secure Email's return on investment is influenced by factors such as use case, organization size, and industry. Fortinet FortiMail provides enhanced email communication, decreased spam, stabilized collections, and altered expenses.
Comparison Results: Cisco Secure Email is highly regarded for its intelligence threat detection, reputation filtering, and robust tracking abilities. The solution’s areas for improvement include data loss prevention and third-party integration. Fortinet FortiMail and Cisco Secure Email have distinct features and functionalities. Fortinet FortiMail is known for its simple setup, user-friendly interface, and effective email filtering. It can be customized and seamlessly integrated with other Fortinet products.
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable feature is its performance."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable features are safe attachments and safe links."
"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 individuals within our organization who are affected."
"I like its investigation capabilities, as that is what is most important to me. It is fairly simple with a user-friendly interface."
"The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning."
"The email protection is excellent, especially in terms of anti-phishing policies."
"Some of the valuable features on the email side are anti-phishing, anti-malware, and Safe Links."
"The filtering is definitely better at catching both spam and malicious messages, and there's a lot of extremely granular ability for setting up rules. You can do it the way you want to. The Microsoft solution tends to be pretty limited in how it allows some of that to be done."
"At one point, there was a zero-day attack. The Cisco appliance detected it and stopped it, helping us out. We avoided the attack and potential damage."
"Initially, the most valuable feature for us was the SenderBase Reputation, because that reduced the number of emails that were even considered by the system by a huge number..."
"The tool comes with AI features. It is good for clients who already use Cisco products due to integration."
"I love the Advanced Malware Protection feature. It works very well... The appliance has more security such as SDF, DKIM, DMARC, and encryption."
"It is a user-friendly product."
"It has an intuitive, clear graphical interface where you can deploy your policies and understand the overall flow. There are a lot of things that you cannot handle on the graphic interface, like message filters. For this, you need to go to a lower level where you have more power, like command line interface. So, this solution has the best of both worlds. There are not a lot of bells and whistles. It is more practical with access to most features that you can configure."
"There are a lot of filters for scam emails and things like that work out of the box. You can also use the antivirus features. I like its features."
"I think the spamming feature is very valuable."
"I am satisfied with both the scalability and the stability of this solution."
"Technical support is great. They are able to look at their patches and offer quick responses. We even have an account manager in the Middle East. They are very good."
"A full-featured email gateway solution that contains security threats reliably."
"It has a very high level of security through special licensing with solutions like FortiGuard, sandboxing solutions in the cloud, and URL rewriting solutions."
"The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiMail are its virus outbreak prevention and FortiSandbox integration."
"We found the initial setup to be mostly straightforward."
"The most valuable aspects of this solution are that it protects us from spam and phishing attacks. We had a lot of attacks coming in and then we deployed this solution and they stopped. We no longer have any spam or phishing issues."
"It would be better if it were more scalable. It depends on the architecture, but we would like to make it more scalable for both data centers."
"The custom alerts have to improve a lot."
"One area for improvement is support, in terms of being able to reach them and, especially, technical support for configuration."
"In some situations, it has not been able to pick impersonated emails having no attachments. Technical support definitely has a scope for improvement."
"The XDR dashboard has room for improvement."
"The only thing they should improve is the licensing model. They should stop changing it. A year ago, the five features I mentioned were included in one product. Now, three of them are bundled into one product, and you have to pay extra for the other two. I don't mind paying extra, but I don't want them to change it every year or every six months. I need to know what I'm looking at and not worry about it next year."
"We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend."
"We need a separate license and we don't know how to get the license that is required."
"We have been struggling in the last month with Cisco encryption and with the S/MIME encryption. I don't know if it is an issue on our side or if these features of the solution are not working very well."
"Cisco is already providing a very good environment with the IronPort solution, but there could be some more integration with other products. For instance, an integration with the EDR solution could be there to raise an alert."
"Scalability has certain shortcomings and needs to be improved because there are service providers who provide better scalability.v"
"I use the search all the time. Sometimes, it is hard to search for things and things are hard to find. People come to me all the time, saying, "This email didn't get through." Then, I go searching and don't find it on the first search. You have to think about alternative searches. I don't know if there is an easier way that they could help to find things. I don't know how they could simplify it, because now everybody else is using the cloud and everything is coming from Office 365, or whatever. It is just not the same environment from years ago where everybody had their own server and you could search easier."
"The product's GUI for the dashboard needs improvement."
"They could improve the filters. In my time at the company, there were several times we had to contact support to update the filters."
"I have some frustrations with the user experience in the interface, specifically with regard to making a list of people for whom I want to allow email access."
"We have Microsoft and we have the E5 licenses, they have more EDR responses on certain emails. That's something that Cisco ESA on the cloud doesn't have. They don't do anything about MITRE attacks. They only detect if there is a malicious email or a threat and they remove it."
"I have little to say about possible improvements, but the configuration for content blocking could be better. So, for example, if the email includes the line "You have a Bitcoin", I would like it to be easier to block it before it enters an inbox. Fortinet could maybe offer better or simpler help on how to do this properly."
"The product could incorporate even more artificial intelligence to enhance the functionality, but it is a competetive and intelligent product as it."
"Fortinet FortiMail's technical support team has shortcomings and needs improvement."
"I don't know if it is possible, but I would like to see Artificial Intelligence and machine learning introduced."
"My customers frequently ask to have detailed documentation for FortiMail and FortiWeb as they have in FortiGate. What they currently have is not enough."
"Maybe FortiMail's integration could be better."
"The Ui isn't that intuitive."
"An additional feature that could be added is a pop-up screen notifying you that an email has been blocked, without having to double click on it to take you there it could provide you with a summary explaining why it was on hold or why was it spam when you hover over it with your cursor."
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Cisco Secure Email is ranked 2nd in Email Security with 55 reviews while Fortinet FortiMail is ranked 5th in Email Security with 54 reviews. Cisco Secure Email is rated 8.4, while Fortinet FortiMail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Email writes "Has effortless spam control, improves security posture, and frees up our IT department's time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiMail writes "Good GUI and configuring security policies is easy but the pricing needs improvement". Cisco Secure Email is most compared with Trellix Collaboration Security, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Proofpoint Email Protection, Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense and Trend Micro Email Security, whereas Fortinet FortiMail is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Barracuda Email Security Gateway, Fortinet FortiMail Cloud, Proofpoint Email Protection and Trend Micro Email Security. See our Cisco Secure Email vs. Fortinet FortiMail report.
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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.