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Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway vs TitanHQ SpamTitan comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

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

Microsoft Defender for Offi...
Sponsored
Ranking in Email Security
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
Email Archiving (1st), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (2nd), Microsoft Security Suite (10th), Secure Email Gateway (SEG) (1st)
Fortra's Clearswift Secure ...
Ranking in Email Security
40th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
0
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
TitanHQ SpamTitan
Ranking in Email Security
12th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (9th), Office 365 Protection (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is 12.3%, down from 16.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TitanHQ SpamTitan is 1.1%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

Tolu Omolaja - PeerSpot reviewer
Great URL scanning and attachment scanning, but I would like more proactive threat analysis
The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning. URL scanning involves an automatic scan of links and emails. When a user clicks on a link within an email, the system promptly checks the link's safety. If the link is deemed safe, access is granted automatically. However, if it is flagged as unsafe, we receive feedback and notification to caution us about the potentially harmful link. At this point, we are presented with the option to proceed or return. I have personally witnessed the system identify a few unsafe links, making this the primary advantage of using the solution. The second crucial aspect is the scanning of attachments. When an email containing an attachment arrives, we receive a notification of the new email, along with information that the attachment is being scanned for threats. This additional layer of security provides peace of mind for our organization. While Microsoft Defender for Office 365 offers numerous features, these two stand out as particularly impressive and valuable to us.
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.
Ricky Brewster - PeerSpot reviewer
Delivers reliable email security with minimal maintenance and valuable threat intelligence
If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said the user interface needed improvement, but we've just updated it. It looks really modern now, and it's a lot easier to use. At the moment, I don't have anything specific for improvement. Additionally, I would suggest different roles for users. We want the ability to lock down certain functions for certain user roles to prevent accidental changes, such as an apprentice accidentally deleting a customer.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The deployment capability is a great feature."
"The most valuable aspect of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is its ability to protect us from malware."
"It’s easy to handle integrations, and we don't need a lot of people in our IT team."
"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."
"My experience with customer support and technical support for Microsoft Defender for Office 365 has been excellent."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable feature is its performance."
"It gives us visibility into threats and, for endpoints, it helps us to prioritize threats. We used to have a lack of visibility, but now our time to detect and respond has decreased."
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"A stable solution."
"Ability to create your own content-filtering policies with relative ease."
"If it can stop all the garbage from getting through, then it is definitely a time saver. It is more protecting our employees than anything. We just want to make sure that we can do everything that we can do to try and prevent people from clicking on bad stuff or having to deal with bad stuff. It is easier to prevent it from coming into the network."
"Within a week of implementing SpamTitan, it blocked a ransomware event."
"One of the most valuable features is that it's very straightforward. It's a really simple interface. With our previous products, you could spend a week, if not more, training on those products just to figure out the interface. With SpamTitan it took an hour or two or three, tops."
"The mail scanning is most valuable. They've been very good. We've used other ones, and everything else seems to be substandard than this. The other thing that I found helpful with SpamTitan was the ability to import rules from other appliances."
"The discovery work to resolve [issues] has gotten so much easier because we can see what's going on right at the edge of our incoming and our outgoing mail. A regular tech support dude can log in... and get a very practical view of what is going on..."
"I had server issues but I still needed to be able to look at what emails I would have received if my email server had been working correctly. SpamTitan has a reporting functionality that showed me what emails would have been sent. I could actually see the content of those emails."
"The initial setup was relatively easy."
"We're now using SpamTitan Plus. It has an extra feature so that if you receive an email with a link, it goes to the TitanHQ server and that link is also checked. That is probably the best feature."
 

Cons

"We need a separate license and we don't know how to get the license that is required."
"The GUI is sometimes slow to fetch the device report and could be improved."
"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."
"The UI needs to be more user-friendly."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 should improve the troubleshooting tools. It's unclear whether the device is blocked at the firewall level or at the device itself. The granularity needed for troubleshooting is currently lacking. From my perspective, Microsoft should address this issue to benefit many users who likely share the same sentiment."
"In some situations, it has not been able to pick impersonated emails having no attachments. Technical support definitely has a scope for improvement."
"One area for improvement is support, in terms of being able to reach them and, especially, technical support for configuration."
"We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend."
"FTP server and TRUST Manager functionality."
"Malware needs improvement."
"Sometimes when I'm trying to pull up reports, the speed can suffer."
"The quarantine report frequency could be better."
"I would also like to see SpamTitan improve on its antivirus software. I believe they're using Bitdefender and ClamAV. A problem with them is that they sometimes miss Trojans and malicious sites. We have internal antivirus software as well, and when we receive emails we see that our local antivirus software has found Trojans in them."
"The interface is a little dated aesthetically. I know that's a small thing, but it could use a little bit of a facelift."
"A lot of the other companies that I deal with have a feature that allows you to modify emails and apply signatures automatically based on linking into Azure's servers and database. That feature isn't there in SpamTitan."
"As a Danish company, it would be great to see a Danish translation for the UI."
"SpamTitan doesn't quarantine when it blocks things based on the remote block list or greylisting. It just deletes the email. When I try to look at these blocked items, it tells me they're gone. RBL or greylisted items aren't saved, so you can check them. There may be a setting somewhere that I haven't seen."
"The user interface of SpamTitan is fair, at best. They're coming out with a new one. The current one is a bit hard to navigate, and that was the biggest part of what made it a steep learning curve. It took three to six months to learn how to find stuff in there."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very expensive."
"Defender is a little bit more expensive as compared to others. We are in the manufacturing environment. So, we don't have a high budget for all of our endpoint devices. Its cost is a major concern for us."
"For licensing, it's usually a yearly package for customers who are subscribed to Office 365, but they can also pay on a monthly basis."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is an add-on to the Office license. Many customers are purchasing this solution."
"I know that the product is incredibly expensive."
"Microsoft Defender is expensive. I typically recommend it only if clients have the budget. Otherwise, I would suggest an alternative."
"While Microsoft Defender for Office 365 necessitates pricier E3 or E5 subscriptions, the extensive functionality offered by these licenses across various Microsoft products justifies the investment."
"For large enterprise organizations, they can definitely afford it, but for small and medium organizations, they might struggle to cover the expenses."
Information not available
"The pricing was a little bit below the average of what we were looking at."
"We used to use FortiClient and Symantec Messaging Gateway. We didn't like Symantec's solution, but we switched because of the cost. SpamTitan was more cost-effective than either of the other solutions."
"The pricing is ideal. A lot of other anti-spams are integrated in Exchange, counting technical mailboxes that are not sending any emails outside. So, they are not scanned and only for internal communication. SpamTitan only counts the emails that it scans. This is one of the best licensing models that I saw for anti-spam solutions because it is counting dynamically the number of emails that senders are sending. It counts these uniquely by week. It provides a very realistic picture. This is very useful because we are not counting the emails doing inbound or outbound notifications from our company."
"The pricing is very reasonable. I know the cloud version costs more because of active 24/7 monitoring, but we take care of that as our setup is on-prem. SpamTitan is in line with what we were paying for GFI MailEssentials but works much better."
"Everything has really been great with the pricing and licensing. In fact, we just implemented ArcTitan because everything was going so well with SpamTitan."
"The pricing of SpamTitan is about right. It's not over-priced per user. It's not super cheap either, but it is a very good product..."
"The cluster was an additional cost. We had to get some more licenses to get to that level. It's well worth it because it means peace of mind for everyone."
"Its pricing is good. It's probably one of the most competitive anti-spam and anti-malware appliances out there for email. I was doing some looking around for pricing before I came to SpamTitan, and for the feature set, the price is very reasonable and competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
21%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Threat Explorer is an invaluable tool for me, and it plays a crucial role in helping me discern the origins of variou...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Microsoft is quite affordable with a lot of features available for any size organization.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Microsoft could improve by offering recommendations for domain spoofing attacks, especially scenarios where DNS recor...
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TitanHQ SpamTitan?
The pricing model is reasonable money for the product. It is rated highly because of its affordability and its great ...
What needs improvement with TitanHQ SpamTitan?
If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said the user interface needed improvement, but we've just updated ...
 

Also Known As

MS Defender for Office 365
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is trusted by companies such as Ithaca College.
Information Not Available
De Montfort University, Scope Services, Park County School District, NRC, Quality Smith, Toyota, CarTrawler, Videotron
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway vs. TitanHQ SpamTitan and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.