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Cisco Secure Email vs Proofpoint Email Protection comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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 One
Sponsored
Ranking in Email Security
20th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (13th), Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (20th), Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) (12th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (7th), Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) Solutions (12th), Access Management (11th), Bot Management (3rd), ZTNA as a Service (9th), ZTNA (4th), Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) (10th), Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) (3rd)
Cisco Secure Email
Ranking in Email Security
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Cisco Security Portfolio (6th)
Proofpoint Email Protection
Ranking in Email Security
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
100
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (3rd), Digital Risk Protection (3rd), Office 365 Protection (1st), Secure Email Gateway (SEG) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Cloudflare One is 1.7%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Email is 4.7%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Proofpoint Email Protection is 7.2%, down from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Proofpoint Email Protection7.2%
Cisco Secure Email4.7%
Cloudflare One1.7%
Other86.4%
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

CV
Network Architect at IP Dimension
Cloud security has improved remote access and has reduced costs for smaller client sites
I have used Cloudflare One's Identity-Aware Proxy, and it is quite straightforward from what I have seen so far. The app registration on the Azure side integrates fully into Cloudflare, and I am very satisfied with that part because it is easy to set up. The integration of Cloudflare One's Secure Web Gateway and Zero Trust Network Access works without any issues. That part is pretty automatic, and if you complete the rest of the setup, it comes together by itself with no issues from my side. What makes it nice is that we can actually start replacing on-site firewalls at this stage for the smaller clients because it does not matter if they go to a coffee shop or work from home; they are still secured by the same connection. The hops get shorter and you get better latency. We have done testing to see if it is better. One thing that we did notice with our proof of concept with our current client is that they have people connecting from the UK. When they used their previous VPN solution, uploading CAD drawings and other files to the server took a long time. They mentioned that it is much quicker on Cloudflare One's solution. I definitely believe that is part of the improved performance, and I am satisfied with that as well. What is nice about Cloudflare One is that it makes the setup easier and also easier to train technicians to maintain it. Compared to legacy systems, we do not need to get fancy firewalls in place that are costly. That is definitely also a cost-saver with Cloudflare One.
KS
Technical Associate Network Security at Valuepoint Systems
Email security has protected financial data and provides clear tracking for every branch message
The areas of Cisco Secure Email that could be improved or enhanced are the slowness in the console. I don't think it was a database error or something, but we feel some slowness in configuring DLP and other content filters compared to other consoles. It may have been due to on-premises, but it was much noisy at some times while configuring DLP. When we tried to configure a DLP policy, the console became much slower. In that case, we cannot see what had happened in the mail which was blocked at that time. It may take nearly an hour to get back to normal while configuring policies. That is the major issue in the product.
Vivek_Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Engineer at LTI Mindtree
Advanced email defenses have protected healthcare staff and simplified incident response
There are many things that could be improved, but once you are very well-known about this application, you could perform that improvement plan. There are many scenarios where I have worked with Proofpoint Email Protection where a requirement was not fulfilled due to the limitation of the product. For example, we have Report Phish automation. With Proofpoint Email Protection, we can configure Report Phish and forward the email to any email addresses or shared mailboxes that we provide in the configuration. That email is forwarded as is with whatever the user reports as a phishing email. However, some organizations do not want the reported phishing email to go as is into their ticketing tool because it might contain malicious attachments and malicious links that are not required to go into their internal organization. Proofpoint Email Protection has that limitation. They cannot forward or restrict, but could forward only limited information such as some header information, sender subject details, or only limited information. As it is, the email can be forwarded, not as limited information. Proofpoint TRAP solution also has limitations. It cannot create alert notifications for some specific requirements because Proofpoint works the way it is designed, and if you want it to work based on our requirement, that should not be possible. There is a scope of limitations here. There are many improvements that should be made. First, they should work on their false positive minimization. Proofpoint generally takes all emails, investigates them, and classifies them. There are many situations where legit emails are blocked because that domain is found to be under a malicious category somehow, but actually it is not. False positive minimization could be improved, and they could enhance their other applications or solutions. There are many things that they could improve from each application and each portal.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Cloudflare is by far the most effective solution that I have come across."
"Clover is the best product globally."
"The capabilities of the software are strong enough for me to do what it's supposed to do. For me, we don't need to do a lot of configuration on our site. We just enable it and monitor it."
"The simplicity of the solution is its valuable features as almost no effort was needed to learn the configurations. It is also one of the cheapest firewalls available in this category."
"Cloudflare Access is part of the Zero Trust philosophy."
"The blocking feature is very good."
"The best feature is rate limiting. If I'm expecting 500 visits per hour, Cloudflare will limit the requests if I suddenly get 50,000."
"Cloudflare DDoS mitigates DDoS attacks."
"Users were able to do a check by themselves on quarantined emails. They could check if a valid email had been stopped, if it matched up with the SPF certification."
"We like the in-built features, like the email filtering based on the IP and domain. Cisco has its own blacklisted domains and IPs, which is very good. This filters around 70 percent of emails from spam, and we are seeing fewer false positives with this."
"Compared with other mail security things, Cisco Secure Email was much better and easy to deploy also."
"The tool's most valuable feature in preventing security breaches revolves around the area of malware protection that the product provides."
"The tool has a DLP solution which we can implement. Its database is updated regularly."
"The security features are valuable."
"My favorite feature of Cisco Secure Email is the threat intelligence capabilities, particularly its integration with Cisco Talos."
"It is a user-friendly product."
"They have customized security rules, mature rules, anti-virus protection, as well as email authentication similar to SPF, DKIM, and DMARC."
"It's the top choice because no company can operate without security. Ensuring email protection is a major priority for any organization when building its infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature is the option to edit the inbound security."
"Proofpoint Email Protection has positively impacted my organization by reducing the number of cyber email attacks we are receiving compared to the past."
"The biggest ROI for us was when it stopped a ransomware attack, which could have cost us a ton of money and been detrimental to the company, so it basically paid for itself right there."
"URL scanning and online relay service are the most valuable features of Proofpoint Email Protection."
"Out of these three, no other email gateway can be compared with Proofpoint Email Protection."
"The flexibility is unbelievable and you could get extremely creative to accommodate real case scenarios."
 

Cons

"The tool should provide on-premise versions. Currently, all versions are cloud-based."
"For the topic of improvement, providing some training material is one of my suggestions."
"The initial onboarding was causing us some confusion."
"Cloudflare One is not very powerful, but for what we require, it is basic and sufficient."
"I would like them to include a VPN feature to provide a secure connection to the data center."
"Lacks a VPN feature to provide a secure connection to the data center."
"When there are any dynamic changes in complex applications, the tool takes a lot of time, making its analytics-related area a major matter of concern where improvements are needed."
"Cloudflare DDoS has poor technical support."
"They can do it better with web links, with the URLs. They have a technology called Outbreak but it doesn't work as well as we would like."
"We didn't get any malware, but a few phishing emails, maybe one or two, slipped in."
"The interface is dated. It has looked pretty much the same for 15 years or so."
"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."
"In future releases, I would like to see two main improvements come to mind. First, the current solution requires maintaining two separate operating systems for FTD, which can be cumbersome. I'd love to see a single operating system for the FTD box."
"They can do it better with web links, with the URLs."
"We cannot manage multiple devices from a single UI."
"We didn't get any malware, but a few phishing emails, maybe one or two, slipped in."
"Regarding improvements or enhancements in Proofpoint Email Protection, I find the platform somewhat chaotic. It has too many different sections that perform the same function, which is very confusing."
"While Proofpoint is better, I find Abnormal to be much more effective because it uses an advanced AI engine to detect email spams and phishing."
"The scalability can be improved, and the solution can be optimized."
"While ingesting the logs into our SIEM tool, most organizations don't have the capability to buy the email gateway as it is quite an expensive one."
"I feel there is still room for improvement because many features are in POD and not yet available in the Admin Portal."
"You only receive one model in Proofpoint Email Protection and the other ones you have to purchase at a high price."
"We'd like to have the ability to create more customized reports."
"The solution could be improved with the addition of PLP and email encryption features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of the solution is cheap. The licensing cost is also very low. I rate the cost and pricing a three out of ten."
"The solution's pricing lacks transparency."
"Cloudflare Zero Trust Platform's pricing is good."
"The price tag is no longer $200,000, but rather $300,000 to $400,000. It's twice."
"The pricing is somewhere in the middle. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten."
"The prices are slightly expensive."
"My company has to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the solution. There are no hidden charges apart from the licensing costs of the solution."
"The solution is not that expensive."
"The price is significantly high."
"There were no other costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"Cisco Secure Email is not expensive, and licensing costs are yearly."
"Cisco Secure Email is more expensive than other products. I rate it a five out of ten. There are no additional costs. You only need to pay the subscription amounts."
"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."
"The license was not per user, the license model was per feature. You could choose anti-virus, anti-spam, etc. It was feature-based and charged yearly."
"I rate the product price as six on a scale of one to ten, where one means it is a very expensive tool."
"I don't have the insights into it, but compared to different products, it seems to have a medium level of pricing."
"The licensing cost of Proofpoint Email Protection is a lot higher than other solutions, such as Barracuda."
"We sell annual licenses for this solution."
"I rate the price of Proofpoint Email Protection a four out of five."
"Proofpoint Email Protection is a reasonably priced product, which means that it is neither too low nor too high in terms of price."
"Customers pay around $90,000 yearly for a 1,000-user organization, with the subscription license being the main expense, apart from implementation fees."
"Proofpoint Email Protection has comparable pricing."
"The solution is expensive."
"The end customer is buying our solution, which can be for monthly or annual usage depending on our payment and business model."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
20%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise57
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Access?
Cloudflare Access has strong integration with Microsoft, among other platforms. However, when it comes to Kaspersky, ...
What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Access?
Cloudflare Access provides secure access to internal applications for employees, external members of the organization...
What advice do you have for others considering Cloudflare Access?
Cloudflare Access is one of the best integrations available. While about two hundred vendors offer similar services, ...
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 areas of Cisco Secure Email that could be improved or enhanced are the slowness in the console. I don't think it ...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Email?
We are using Cisco Secure Email to monitor the outgoing and incoming mail traffic in our financial institute. We have...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Proofpoint Email Protection?
I would say that the pricing for Proofpoint Email Protection is a little costly compared to other email tools, but it...
What needs improvement with Proofpoint Email Protection?
I believe Proofpoint Email Protection can be improved; currently, it does not allow organizations to create their own...
What is your primary use case for Proofpoint Email Protection?
My main use case for Proofpoint Email Protection is working as an anti-spam and phishing analyst, where I need to pro...
 

Also Known As

Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security, Cloudflare Bot Management, Cloudflare Gateway, Cloudflare Zero Trust Platform, Cloudflare DDoS, Cloudflare SASE & SSE Platform
Cisco Email Security, IronPort, Cisco Email Security, ESA, Email Security Appliances
Proofpoint Enterprise Protection, Proofpoint Digital Protection
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

23andMe
SUNY Old Westbury, CoxHealth, City of Fullerton, Indra
Blocket, University of Waterloo, Lincoln Memorial University, WellSpan Health, U-Haul, Carestream Health, Westinghouse
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Email vs. Proofpoint Email Protection and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
896,202 professionals have used our research since 2012.