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Proofpoint Email Protection vs Symantec Advanced Threat Protection comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Proofpoint Email Protection
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (1st), Digital Risk Protection (5th), Office 365 Protection (1st), Secure Email Gateway (SEG) (1st)
Symantec Advanced Threat Pr...
Ranking in Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
24th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) category, the mindshare of Proofpoint Email Protection is 3.0%, down from 9.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Advanced Threat Protection is 2.2%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Proofpoint Email Protection3.0%
Symantec Advanced Threat Protection2.2%
Other94.8%
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
 

Featured Reviews

Siva_Prasad - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Email defenses have reduced phishing incidents and protect sensitive data across our enterprise
As things are evolving and threats develop in unpredictable ways, Proofpoint must adopt AI solutions and agentic solutions more aggressively and provide them to customers as part of service offerings. Inbuilt AI solutions would add more value and make Proofpoint a more premium choice for customers. With the help of AI solutions, agentic AI, and generative AI capabilities, the product would be more efficient than it currently is. Filtering false positives is highly challenging because it is impossible for humans to identify which emails are genuine and which are spam. Proofpoint should focus more on this area with back-end agents or other tools. Proofpoint should decide which emails are genuine and which are spam so it is not a challenge for end users. When receiving an email, end users should not have to determine whether to respond or not. Proofpoint should not release such spam emails and should strictly block such spam and spoof emails based on connection IPs. Currently, false positives occur in the product, and while this occurs in every product, it is an area where Proofpoint can focus on improving and reducing false positives. One email is enough for an end user to be deceived and lose money, so addressing this area is critical.
Dennis O'Reilly - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber SecOps Principal at Dotcom Security
Provides end-to-end antivirus protection and has good stability
Symantec Endpoint Protection provides end-to-end protection. Along with antivirus protection, it has a lot of key areas, including intrusive prevention, firewall features, and application and device control. It can integrate with other Broadcom solutions, such as Symantec Messaging Gateway and Symantec DLP. If you want to send an email, it gets scanned through endpoint protection and DLP. We get all Symantec functionality in a single pane.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has very strong detection for most of the phishing and malicious emails received from the outside."
"The spam filter for email is good."
"Proofpoint Email Protection has positively impacted our organization in a very fruitful way."
"Proofpoint Email Protection is a strong and reliable solution for defending against advanced email threats, especially phishing and targeted attacks."
"Using Proofpoint Email Protection has significantly improved SOC analyst workloads for my customers by enhancing response times and adding value through built-in threat investigation tools."
"Proofpoint is the main tool for blocking spam because it denies the connection altogether."
"I would recommend Proofpoint Email Protection to others because it is useful, simple to use, and provides whatever is required."
"Using Proofpoint Email Protection significantly reduces the number of threats I need to guard against; within a month, my organization sends and receives over 1 million emails, achieving 99.99% protection against phishing and spam, and handling around 5 to 10 million emails monthly while assigning a project manager for ongoing review."
"Their integrations are pretty good as are their Sandbox solutions, their proxies, and their LTAs with API or ICAP protocols."
"The most valuable feature is NetFlow threat protection."
"Technical support is very responsive. You just have to open a ticket. They respond in a timely manner. Their response is good. I'm satisfied."
"It has certainly helped out our audit efforts because we each stay compliant in terms of various security standards."
"You don't have to buy a separate email security platform. You can enable that using their endpoint, and I like that. You don't have to have two agents running on the same box."
"Currently we have 800-plus nodes connected with this solution, without any issues. The solution is scalable."
"The most valuable feature is Click-time URL protection."
"Overall, the product supports everything already feature-wise, because it has email protection, monitoring detection, network intrusion detection, and advanced threat protection."
 

Cons

"The licensing cost of Proofpoint Email Protection is a lot higher than other solutions, such as Barracuda."
"However, for the cons, it requires continuous policy tuning to manage false positives. A Proofpoint Email Protection engineer requires continuous policy tuning to manage false positives, which is a disadvantage."
"We have seen a reduction in phishing incidents with Proofpoint Email Protection, but not fully; it is not 100%, and there are still cracks within the walls of Proofpoint Email Protection that let this type of email in for various reasons."
"I chose 9 out of 10 because it is based on the customization of exporting logs, and the user experience of the rule-based alerting and the portal is slightly lacking, which is why I deducted that one point."
"Unfortunately, the whole product is going downhill right now, ever since they were sold to Thoma Bravo. We're constantly having problems with stability and the product in general."
"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."
"Sometimes it detects false positives."
"There are user interface complexities that require integration with a SOC team, which needs time and training."
"Symantec appliances need improvement. The whole appliance environment is a robust system and it needs a massive amount of storage space. If you have to increase or speed up the background storage it's a pretty complicated process. The scalability and sizing is critical, and if you do it wrong you run into issues pretty quickly."
"The support team that Symantec offers didn't know how to solve issues even though they referred to themselves as "engineers"."
"There are some ‎features that would add value to this product. One of them would be a graphical presentation of threats that the system has encountered."
"It also needs network-based threat protection for shared folders and files."
"I think SonicWall and McAfee are better solutions."
"The cloud platform needs to have improvement in terms of the user interface and the different capabilities it has available. It needs to match the other leading next-gen EDR products that are available in the market. That's the reason why we are stepping away from Symantec. Their cloud environment is just generally lacking in comparison to others."
"Entire threat protection is not available for the advanced features."
"An improvement could be made on the reporting because then it would be easier to collect information and submit it for compliance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"The licensing is basically $8/user."
"The solution charges per user per month to use it. There are not any additional fees in addition to the standard living fees."
"Pricing has recently been increased and the cost is a downside"
"The end customer is buying our solution, which can be for monthly or annual usage depending on our payment and business model."
"The licensing cost of Proofpoint Email Protection is a lot higher than other solutions, such as Barracuda."
"We sell annual licenses for this solution."
"In general, the pricing is competitive."
"Symantec Advanced Threat Protection's pricing is comparable."
"Pricing is good. It is nice to have a great product at a fair price."
"The price is quite expensive."
"The pricing of this solution is inexpensive and affordable."
"Symantec Endpoint Protection has an average price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Outsourcing Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business31
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise62
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Proofpoint Email Protection?
To improve Proofpoint Email Protection, I suggest breaking down the URL into one versus three different GUIs. Regarding Proofpoint Email Protection's AI capabilities, I think its governance and sec...
What is your primary use case for Proofpoint Email Protection?
My main use case for Proofpoint Email Protection includes phishing emails, spam, URL isolation, and training. I utilize the email protect portal to ensure that none of our employees in any of the b...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

Proofpoint Enterprise Protection, Proofpoint Digital Protection
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blocket, University of Waterloo, Lincoln Memorial University, WellSpan Health, U-Haul, Carestream Health, Westinghouse
ECI
Find out what your peers are saying about Proofpoint Email Protection vs. Symantec Advanced Threat Protection and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
921,148 professionals have used our research since 2012.