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IRONSCALES vs Symantec Messaging Gateway comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 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

IRONSCALES
Ranking in Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
7th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (17th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (18th)
Symantec Messaging Gateway
Ranking in Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Secure Email Gateway (SEG) category, the mindshare of IRONSCALES is 4.0%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Messaging Gateway is 2.6%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Secure Email Gateway (SEG) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IRONSCALES4.0%
Symantec Messaging Gateway2.6%
Other93.4%
Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
 

Featured Reviews

Hemeshen Govender - PeerSpot reviewer
Applies AI automation to clearly identify and stop a lot of phishing emails
The solution captures a bit more of the unknown, quantifies it, and applies intelligence to it to pick out and stop a lot of phishing emails that come through. The solution improved our response to phishing attempts. IRONSCALES has a virtual assistant and some AI intelligence that's applied to it. That was the main differentiator between IRONSCALES and Microsoft. The solution's AI automation clearly identifies phishing emails and gives you an overall indication of why it found the mail to be malicious. It does the whole analysis for you to see why the email was deemed a phishing email. The solution's response time is better than that of our previous tool. The solution's user interface is pretty straightforward and user-friendly.
Dennis O'Reilly - PeerSpot reviewer
The product provides good content filtering options, but the false positive submissions must be improved
The tool is very stable. I rate the stability a seven out of ten. It's an on-premise application that runs on a virtual machine. It has dependencies on the hypervisor host that we're running it on. If it's not configured, the application can be influenced by it. Sometimes, there is a service stop error while the service is still running. Sometimes, the service just stops. Some policies do not act the way that we intend them to respond.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The fact that it is set-and-forget is valuable. Once you turn it on, you very rarely have to micromanage it, whereas, with a lot of spam filters, you have to go in very often."
"The solution captures a bit more of the unknown, quantifies it, and applies intelligence to it to pick out and stop a lot of phishing emails that come through."
"The report function through Gmail is probably the most valuable feature. The next most valuable features are simulation and training."
"The stability is good."
"For what was being offered with IRONSCALES, I feel like we got an incredible deal."
"It is a totally stable solution."
"The most valuable features of the solution are that it is easy to set it up, install, and manage the product."
"I would say the most valuable feature is what they call Themis. It's like a virtual analyst that uses the decisions that system admins make to generate a score for whether an email is legitimate, spam, or phishing. It gets better based on the decisions that we make over time. The automation piece is great as well. The integrated approach of email security combined with employee awareness training is excellent."
"The feature that I like the best is the fingerprinting concept."
"The solution is "set and forget". You pay for it and everything is done for you."
"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."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway has a good GUI, and it is very powerful in detecting viruses and spam."
"The cloud-based interface is very user-friendly."
"It has very good capabilities for managing malware."
"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."
"Symantec is a secure product."
 

Cons

"I would love to see the indication of compromise and how the solution utilizes open source resources. It would be good to see that included in the paid versions. It would be a small addition but add a lot of value for clients."
"The only thing that I could say is that some of the reporting features could be better."
"The tool supports 15 to 16 languages, but the content it uses in the training in Spanish has certain limitations."
"I think the tool can continue to hone the product to ensure the detections are accurate."
"Its UI could be improved. My pet peeve with a lot of these cloud-based systems is that a lot of times, the interface for the management is a little clunky. If you live and breathe IRONSCALES all day long, you'll obviously know where everything is just from muscle memory, but the system is not designed for people to be in it all day long. You're only supposed to occasionally look at it. When things get moved around, it is not necessarily that intuitive. I'm an IT guy, and I can pretty much take the worst UI and figure it out, but the menus and the options in the interface could be a little cleaner graphically. If you have a quick problem that you want to resolve, it takes a little bit of digging in the admin console, whereas it should take a few clicks up front."
"IRONSCALES should bundle more features together instead of separating them and charging additional licensing fees."
"There's room for improvement in the campaign management. IRONSCALES has many built-in templates that I use, but you can also build templates from scratch. However, the interface for creating custom templates needs to be updated."
"The integration with Google Suite needs to be better. it's something they can work on."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It is a nice product but is not user friendly in terms of the graphical interface. It is poor and is not rich in terms of the human interface."
"It could be more scalable."
"The solution takes up a lot of memory."
"Messaging Gateway's advanced malware detection could be improved."
"What needs to be improved in Symantec Messaging Gateway is its local partner support, as it's not as technical. The support my company gets from the partner isn't good. Vendor support is good, but local partner support isn't. I'm happy with Symantec Messaging Gateway as a solution, but the problem is with its partner support. To me, Symantec Messaging Gateway is a complete solution, but it can be very difficult to search the web for resolutions to issues or problems you experience from it. If this could be improved or resolved in the next release of Symantec Messaging Gateway, then that would be good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is not very cheap, but it is affordable."
"The product is available as a middle-priced tool. I think it is not the cheapest solution."
"There is an installation cost. Since we have this as a managed service, we pay for licensing and the managed service itself. Other than that, there are no additional costs."
"Considering the value it provides, it is definitely worth the cost. We don't have to do manual analysis and remediation of phishing emails, which saves us a lot of hours. Its licensing is based on the number of users being supported and the number of email addresses being protected. I'm not aware of any additional costs."
"We pay $3000 plus a little more a year for the number of employees we have, and we're not even that big. The solution is at the higher end in terms of cost. It's not the most expensive product, but I would say it's worth the price if you have a high volume of email traffic. In our case, the solution has inspected over 162,000 emails between three and four months. It saved us a lot of time and money. It's a worthwhile investment because a bad actor only has to succeed once; we must defend against everything in our business. IRONSCALES offers a sense of security and confidence from being well protected."
"They are pretty much the same as all the other competitors in the market."
"IRONSCALES is an expensive solution."
"As compared to everything else we looked at, it was good. It was the best value for the dollars."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway’s pricing is very cheap."
"They're a little costly compared to Microsoft."
"A subscription for technical support costs extra."
"It's a bit expensive compared to its competitor Barracuda Email Security Gateway but cheaper than Sophos Email."
"The cost of Symantec Messaging Gateway is too expensive in general. However, the appliance also includes the price of the license in the same bundle."
"For 150 users, we pay INR 1,60,000."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
University
5%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IRONSCALES?
The solution captures a bit more of the unknown, quantifies it, and applies intelligence to it to pick out and stop a lot of phishing emails that come through.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IRONSCALES?
While I don't specifically oversee the pricing details, I understand that IRONSCALES is in the range of similar solutions while offering better results.
What needs improvement with IRONSCALES?
There are areas that could be improved with this product. Regarding the Spanish language awareness training, while they are producing good content, it appears to be initially produced in English an...
What needs improvement with Symantec Messaging Gateway?
The solution takes up a lot of memory. The system becomes slow. The performance must be improved.
What is your primary use case for Symantec Messaging Gateway?
We use the solution to secure our data and emails.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Symantec.cloud, Symantec Email Security.cloud
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Allegheny Millwork, Ayrshire College, Nium, Orris, Paramount School District, Pres Les, PRT Staffing, Recovery Unplugged, Telit, WebHelp
Doric, Joblink Plus, Our Lady of Mercy College, Parramatta, PPB Advisory, Slater & Gordon Lawyers, Sydney Adventist Hospital Ltd.
Find out what your peers are saying about IRONSCALES vs. Symantec Messaging Gateway and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,202 professionals have used our research since 2012.