We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Email and Symantec Messaging Gateway based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Email Security solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The risk level notifications are most valuable. We get to know what kind of intrusion or attack is there, and we can fix a problem on time."
"The product is not resource-intensive."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is the ease of use."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 helps people to work remotely. It is a secure solution. We don't need to use our company's computers or get VPN connections to the networks. I can control how they share screens and what they send to the devices. It keeps our organizations confidential and sensitive information safe."
"The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning."
"There are several features that I consider valuable."
"The most valuable feature is protection against malicious links, fishing, and impersonation. You can train people to be aware of these threats, but they're not always careful. When they're using their phones between meetings, they click on a link, and it's game over."
"The benefit that stands out to me is the ability for multiple individuals to collaborate simultaneously within the same document. Additionally, there is the option to save the document directly in the integrated OneDrive or SharePoint."
"It has the IMS engine, Intelligent Multi-Scan engine, and it does a good job, right out-of-the-box, of blocking the vast majority of things that should be blocked."
"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."
"This solution provides some benefits, like comfortable access to TAC support. You get prompt support when working directly with Cisco."
"Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway has allowed our users to be able to concentrate on the emails that they do receive. Previously, our users had to deal with nine million additional emails across the organization, which is nearly 1,000 emails per user to have to deal with a month. That's a massive amount for our staff to deal with and probably several hours of their time. We have a lot of clinical staff, being a hospital. We want to make our staff as productive as possible. By removing a lot of that spam and phishing type emails, this allows them to do their job."
"It's flexible. There are a lot of rules and policies that can be easily applied for certain employees or certain mailboxes."
"There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails."
"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."
"Cisco Secure Email has strong inbound services."
"I like that it's simple and easy to configure, deploy, and manage. The reporting function has all the features we're looking for, and we are fine with that."
"The solution is excellent at blocking spam."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway has a huge knowledge base about phishing, spamming, spoofing, etc."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the content filtering policies because the solution offers huge options for configuration, such as hardware manipulation, et cetera, and the dictionaries make the work easier."
"The solution is highly customizable. You can make rules for domains and configure policies for spam or malware. Messaging Gateway is an on-prem solution, so it's useful for companies without a cloud presence."
"It has very good capabilities for managing malware."
"The cloud-based interface is very user-friendly."
"Messaging Gateway is stable."
"The pre-sales cost calculations could be more transparent."
"There needs to be an improvement in integrating the product to work across multiple operating systems, and to have better support for non-Microsoft file types."
"Too many false positives and lacks an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites."
"There is room for improvement with the UI."
"The visibility for the weaknesses in the system and unauthorized access can be improved."
"We noticed that from time to time, Microsoft's stability does have problems. Sometimes the service goes up and down. Sometimes they change without prior notice."
"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 product must provide better malware detection."
"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."
"There are some concerns in the way the architecture is set up, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The product's GUI for the dashboard needs improvement."
"We have occasionally had hardware problems because we are using an appliance-based solution, but that might change. We may consider going to virtual systems."
"The configuration UI should be made more intuitive. Currently, it takes a while to understand how to do the basic configurations."
"The interface is dated. It has looked pretty much the same for 15 years or so. It would be helpful to be able to do everything from one spot. The centralized quarantine and reporting are completely separate from policy administration."
"Cisco Email Secure's pricing needs to be less. We have vendors who provide cheaper solutions with the same features."
"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."
"What's lacking when you compare it with Proofpoint and other threat protection solutions is that it does the basic stuff, but we need more advanced threat handling."
"In a later release, it would be nice if the messaging gateway supported the cluster feature."
"They have updated the version of the Messaging Gateway and the new features they are adding the need to be re-evaluated. They have done some changes on the policy."
"The false positive submissions must be improved."
"Sometimes the solution picks up false positive for viruses during scans."
"The solution takes up a lot of memory."
"The documentation could have more detailed examples of how to use the product in various situations. As more companies shift to the cloud, they could better integrate the on-prem and cloud versions through an on-prem client."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway should include better exclusions and exceptions for better administration."
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Cisco Secure Email is ranked 2nd in Email Security with 55 reviews while Symantec Messaging Gateway is ranked 6th in Secure Email Gateway (SEG) with 20 reviews. Cisco Secure Email is rated 8.4, while Symantec Messaging Gateway is rated 8.2. 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 Symantec Messaging Gateway writes "A stable and reasonably priced solution that performs well and has a very good malware database". Cisco Secure Email is most compared with Trellix Collaboration Security, Fortinet FortiMail, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Proofpoint Email Protection and Barracuda Email Security Gateway, whereas Symantec Messaging Gateway is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Fortinet FortiMail, Trend Micro Email Security, Proofpoint Email Protection and Barracuda Email Security Gateway. See our Cisco Secure Email vs. Symantec Messaging Gateway report.
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.