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Cisco Secure Email vs Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway vs Webroot Advanced Email Encryption powered by Zix comparison

 

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Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Email Security
Email Security
Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
 

Featured Reviews

PaulGiles - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good visibility into the traffic, valuable reporting, and secure remote access
A lot of our customers use another Cisco product already, so they have confidence in Cisco products. The firewalls they are currently deploying and using have evolved from their older ASA products. They are now moving to the new Firepower Threat Defense, which incorporates many more features and allows them to get the latest ALOFT download and feeds for any security vulnerabilities and they're able to react very quickly to any vulnerabilities that have been highlighted. Initially, when the firewalls were first marketed and came onto the market, the visibility wasn't very good. But as the software evolved over time, that visibility has increased a lot more, and that is giving customers a lot more competence in the traffic and the traffic flows that they're seeing through the actual devices, so they can better understand the types of applications that they have on their network. The good thing about the actual firewall itself is that it can integrate with other Cisco products, such as Cisco ISE so that it allows full end-to-end visibility of connectivity. It gives very good visibility. It's that integration with other products, not just what that individual firewall can do itself. Talos is obviously fundamental to the actual firewall, reporting on vulnerabilities that are happening day to day. And the regular downloads, obviously, give customers confidence that their products are as secure as they can actually be.
PC
Stable, but malware needs improvement and customer support is poor
They need to improve the malware in the product. I am not satisfied with Clearswift because of the lack of customer support. The support is poor, the supplier takes a lot of time and it's expensive. We have some issues here when I contact the supplier, it takes a lot of time for them to get back to us but there's no solution. I am now looking at Symantec as a possible alternative.
John Zupancic - PeerSpot reviewer
Inexpensive, with good email security, but the technical support could be improved
We don't have as many problems with email security. They have some areas that could be improved. For example, we also use this solution for email encryption, which was clunky and could be improved, but the email security itself has been excellent. The web interface works well but the Outlook plug-in has been problematic. We've had to uninstall/reinstall it. On some Outlook clients (including mine), it causes Outlook to stop responding. I disabled the Outlook plug-in and only use the web interface.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The logs are easily readable and help diagnose problems, although they can be difficult to find initially. The solution addresses our email security, but for the rest of our security, we would use multiple vendors. It covers everything through email, like antivirus, IDS, and IPS."
"Cisco Secure Email is a budget-friendly solution."
"Because we scan products, and there is a lot of critical data, security is very important in these cases."
"There were detailed logs available. That was a seriously good feature... It turns out these were actually spoof emails that came into our environment. I got to know about them from the log system."
"I love the Advanced Malware Protection feature. It works very well... The appliance has more security such as SDF, DKIM, DMARC, and encryption."
"The user interface was quite friendly, it was quite easy to use, unlike some other Cisco products. Anybody could use it. You don't have to be familiar with IT to be able to handle navigating it."
"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."
"It blocks bulk marketing messages, graymail, spam, and provides advanced malware protection."
"Ability to create your own content-filtering policies with relative ease."
"A stable solution."
"They do a better job of determining what's real and what's not than most of the other solutions we have tried, and it's been very painless to use."
 

Cons

"Many smaller businesses opt for more cost-effective solutions, such as Gmail or Hotmail accounts, instead of investing in Cisco Secure Email, given its higher cost."
"Typically, in a phishing email, they try to use a name everybody's going to recognize, like the CEO's name or the CFO's name... With this appliance, the way it's designed at the moment, for us to really stop that with any level of confidence, we have to build a dictionary of all the names of the people we want it to check, and all the ways they could be spelled. My name would be in there as Phillip Collins, Phillip D. Collins, Phillip Dean Collins, Phil Collins, Phil D. Collins. There could be eight or 10 variations of my name that we'd have to put in the dictionary. There's no artificial intelligence to say "Phil Collins" could be all these other things, and to stop phishing from coming through in that way."
"The area of license renewal should be improved. We normally renew our license every year. There is a feature called smart licensing, and I switched from the legacy mode to the smart licensing mode because of what I thought smart licensing does. I thought it would make licensing renewal seamless and very swift, but ever since I've switched to smart licensing, each time I want to renew my license, it is a whole lot of headache. The process is not smooth, and I had to keep calling Cisco TAC to see how the issue can be resolved. At one point, I wanted to revert back to the legacy mode, but I can't revert. Once you switch from the legacy mode to the smart licensing mode, you can't revert. They should improve on the visibility of the smart licensing mode so that it can indeed be smart and easier to use for the license renewal every year. That is one challenge."
"The management features of the product are not up to date."
"The scalability must be improved."
"The initial setup was complex because I have two sites with physical clusters."
"I would rate the stability a six out of ten. We had multiple issues with the stability."
"In some cases, detection is missed, leading to false positives where genuine emails are flagged as spam."
"FTP server and TRUST Manager functionality."
"Malware needs improvement."
"They have some areas that could be improved. For example, we also use this solution for email encryption, which was clunky and could be improved, but the email security itself has been excellent."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is significantly high."
"It is a relatively expensive option compared to other alternatives."
"I rate the pricing a ten out of ten on a scale where one means it is less cost-effective, and ten means it is the most cost-effective solution."
"The product's price falls on the higher side when compared to the other products on the market."
"You're going to get what you pay for. If you're not willing to pay the price of Cisco, you're not going to get a product that's as good as Cisco. I don't think Cisco is overpriced, because for the last two years I've been comparing it to Microsoft and Cisco has been cheaper and given us more features."
"Compared to Cisco's on-prem service, the cost is the same, but you don't have to pay for the hardware and you don't have to maintain the system, as far as upgrades and hardware failures are concerned. It is cheaper to operate on their cloud service than it is to operate with their on-prem service."
"I rate the product price as six on a scale of one to ten, where one means it is a very expensive tool."
"There were no other costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
Information not available
"In terms of pricing, I believe they provide excellent value."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Insurance Company
8%
Legal Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Email?
Cisco Secure Email is a budget-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Email?
The pricing structure is good as it is user-based or email client-based, which is positive for clients.
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Email?
The user interface of the Email Security Gateway ( /products/security-gateway-reviews ) should be improved. It would ...
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Also Known As

Cisco Email Security, IronPort, Cisco Email Security, ESA, Email Security Appliances
No data available
Zix Email Encryption, ZixEncrypt
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SUNY Old Westbury, CoxHealth, City of Fullerton, Indra
Information Not Available
Erie County of Pennsylvania’s Human Services Department, Justice Federal Credit Union, STAR Financial Group, Chisago County, Minn., The National Banks of Central Texas, Kentucky Retirement Systems (KRS), Frankfort, Ky, Athletico Physical Therapy, District of Columbia Retirement Board (DCRB), CIBM Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Proofpoint, Abnormal Security and others in Email Security. Updated: July 2025.
862,543 professionals have used our research since 2012.