We performed a comparison between Sophos 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."There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails."
"The malicious URL scanning, as well as the anti-malware features, have been really useful for us in our environment."
"I love the Advanced Malware Protection feature. It works very well... The appliance has more security such as SDF, DKIM, DMARC, and encryption."
"It has an intuitive, clear graphical interface where you can deploy your policies and understand the overall flow. There are a lot of things that you cannot handle on the graphic interface, like message filters. For this, you need to go to a lower level where you have more power, like command line interface. So, this solution has the best of both worlds. There are not a lot of bells and whistles. It is more practical with access to most features that you can configure."
"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."
"The added value of it is that every migration to a new version is initiated by the Cisco version itself, so that is a bunch of work that you don't have to do on the Cisco ESA system on-premise. As it becomes a safe platform, you don't need to invest anything in your own data center or in your upgrade path."
"The solution is very configurable. It has enabled us to configure some specific filters to stop emails that general configurations didn't stop. It's a powerful solution. It can analyze a lot of emails simultaneously, with no problems of capacity or system load."
"It is doing its work. It is doing what it was actually designed to do. It has ensured we don't have business email compromises, and it has also ensured that our brand Galaxy is unique all year round."
"When you say email security, it's about everything, incoming email, outgoing email, spam, phishing emails, unwanted marketing emails. You can set rules, but the main feature of Sophos Email is to make sure you don't get hacked. 95% of people who are hacked do not get hacked by typing the router password. They are hacked from the inside out, which means they send you a document that is a zero-day attack, you open it, nothing happens, but technically the attack is running in the background of your computer. This is how they gain access to your PC."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos Email is the sandbox. We're able to scan the file, isolate it, and look at it before it is delivered. It is highly effective."
"It's easy to use and the configuration is straightforward."
"Sophos Email is a stable solution."
"I have found Sophos Email to be scalable."
"The speed and stability were fine."
"It has very good capabilities for managing malware."
"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."
"It is a solid and stable product."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway is stable and scalable. Installation is easy, and the deployment and maintenance can be done by one administrative person."
"What I like most about Symantec Messaging Gateway is its usability. I also find its interface very friendly. The solution has a very good interface."
"The solution is stable and the performance is good."
"Messaging Gateway is stable."
"The most valuable features of Symantec Messaging Gateway are advanced content filtering, malware, and antivirus defense."
"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."
"The configuration UI should be made more intuitive. Currently, it takes a while to understand how to do the basic configurations."
"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."
"The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky."
"I would like more functionality and how to use it for Level 2 type staff. The biggest issue is it needs to be easier to use and navigate."
"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 have Microsoft and we have the E5 licenses, they have more EDR responses on certain emails. That's something that Cisco ESA on the cloud doesn't have. They don't do anything about MITRE attacks. They only detect if there is a malicious email or a threat and they remove it."
"The Forged Email Detection feature needs improvement, particularly with domain. The sensors are not that good and the rules sets are unclear."
"Sophos Email can improve mail security."
"Sophos Email can improve security."
"The installation of Sophos Email could be easier. It's a bit difficult because setting up the email virtually requires some bit of technical knowledge."
"The solution should be able to support the cloud environment."
"The security of the solution could improve."
"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."
"Sometimes the solution picks up false positive for viruses during scans."
"They really need to create a good package that competes with Microsoft."
"The biggest problem is it's an on-prem product and we're trying to get out of having equipment in data centers."
"Symantec Messaging Gateway can improve detection because most of them are false negatives or false positives that we are trying to troubleshoot. Additionally, we are having routing problems and they are somehow connected to DNS issues."
"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."
"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."
"Messaging Gateway's advanced malware detection could be improved."
Sophos Email is ranked 18th in Email Security with 6 reviews while Symantec Messaging Gateway is ranked 17th in Email Security with 8 reviews. Sophos Email is rated 8.4, while Symantec Messaging Gateway is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Sophos Email writes "Effective on-premises and cloud, beneficial sandboxing, and advanced AI detection". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Symantec Messaging Gateway writes "Easy to set up with good patching and reliable performance". Sophos Email is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection, Fortinet FortiMail, Proofpoint Email Protection and Fortinet FortiMail Cloud, whereas Symantec Messaging Gateway is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Fortinet FortiMail, Proofpoint Email Protection and Fortinet FortiMail Cloud. See our Sophos Email vs. Symantec Messaging Gateway report.
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