Avanan vs. Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Avanan
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
Avanan, from Check Point since the August 2021 acquisition, connects security technologies to enterprise cloud applications in order to improve protection of sensitive corporate data and IP. According to the vendor, Avanan's one-click deployment allows customers to deploy a new security solution in seconds. Because it requires no appliance, agent or gateway proxy, Avanan can begin protecting any cloud application immediately, with no effect on users.
$4
per user per month
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense provides protection against email threats that compromise an organization’s brand and operations. Its advanced threat detection capabilities uncover known, emerging and targeted threats. And it expands the scope of organizations' defenses to detect dangerous threats and rapidly search for and remediate threats across security controls. Secure Email Threat Defense's Artificial Intelligence and machine…N/A
Pricing
AvananCisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Editions & Modules
Advanced Anti-Phishing
$4.00
per user per month
Complete Malware Protection
$5.00
per user per month
Full-Suite Protection
$8.00
per user per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AvananCisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsPrices for fewer than 500 users.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AvananCisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Features
AvananCisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Secure Email Gateway
Comparison of Secure Email Gateway features of Product A and Product B
Avanan
8.5
Ratings
2% above category average
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
8.4
Ratings
0% above category average
Anti-malware10.00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Customizability8.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Data Loss Protection8.00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Threat Detection10.00 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Sandboxing6.50 Ratings8.10 Ratings
End-to-End Encryption7.20 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Management Tools10.00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AvananCisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Small Businesses
Zoho Mail
Zoho Mail
Score 9.3 out of 10
Zoho Mail
Zoho Mail
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Trend Micro Worry-Free Services Suite
Trend Micro Worry-Free Services Suite
Score 9.5 out of 10
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Cisco Cloud Email Security
Cisco Cloud Email Security
Score 10.0 out of 10
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AvananCisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(0 ratings)
5.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
6.4
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.3
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
1.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AvananCisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Likelihood to Recommend
This software is well-suited for a company that is looking to protect its data from common security breaches. It is very user-friendly and easy to implement, which is why these few things make it easily usable on a daily basis. This software also allows for much faster cloud performance and provides regular reports which provide security analytics.
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With Cisco Secure Email, we can easily protect our business email system again all manner of attacks. In addition, we are able to send emails securely thanks to encryption and decryption features. It's, therefore, ideal for businesses that value email privacy, such as those in the accounting industry, hospitals, and law firms, among other users.
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Pros
  • The dashboard for Avanan makes all of the most important information easy to digest.
  • Alerting - specifically, the Geo-Location alerts allow us to see if a user has possibly been compromised.
  • The End-User Email Quarantine experience gives users the ability to request emails be released, which trains them to better spot legitimate emails.
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  • Manages Junk Mail Well-We configured and tested our configuration to filter out the majority of junk mail hitting our inboxes.
  • Manages Graymail-We configured and tested our Cisco ETD for graymail filtering and reduced the amount of unwanted advertising and other legitimate emails.
  • Creating unique policies that were tailored to block or allow emails from certain senders.
  • Stopped malicious email traffic (e.g., malicious attachments and links) with rules for identifying and stripping potentially malicious attachments or links.
  • Allows easy configuration for other email security measures such as SPF, DMARC and DKIM.
  • Cisco engineers provide an annual free security health check. We took advantage of several security health checks where Cisco certified engineers go over the security setting of our Cisco ETD. We were provided a written report that highlighted strengths and weaknesses of our Cisco ETD setup.
  • Monitoring email traffic flow is almost overwhelming with the amount of information you can obtain from the portal. This gives valuable information to IT staff in terms of volume and type of emails the company is receiving.
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Cons
  • I only ever had one complaint, we had a few hiccups during the setup process. We have now been a customer for two years and have had no further issues. It is likely that the setup pain points have now been resolved as well. Overall the product does what it claims while providing a very intuitive interface.
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  • The web interface is definitely dated
  • The software updates to the user interface and the documentation online are not congruent. Some docs are old and information is lacking to make changes
  • The email filtering and email search features are really dated. And other tools are more user friendly
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Likelihood to Renew
Cost, need to make sure the cost is competitive for how many users are using email protection as we move users to MS Teams and don't rely so much on full access to email accounts (both sending and receiving internal and external).
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There is a 50/50 chance that we will renew. We are in the middle of moving from on-prem to the cloud so we may not need it once we are fully migrated.
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Usability
Usability is so easy. It was a quick configuration with entering in some credentials, accepting terms and permissions and before you know it it's already going through and taking a look at existing emails. Portal is very easy to use and there are always updates with decent logs. The new UI is great and highly intuitive.
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Good interface, easy to use and set up. If there were any issues, there is very good documentation and videos that one can follow for additional setup and best practices. As typical with most Cisco solutions, there are more features than needed for our purposes but good to know they are there in case of future needs
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Reliability and Availability
Always been available as needed.
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Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense's availability is great and reliable when you need it most. We haven't had any noticeable outages or issues.
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Performance
It's not all the time, on occasion the platform can delay email by seven to ten minutes.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Avanan support always is ready to respond to user requests and typically does it in an exceptionally quick timeframe. Most requests are not even needed to be escalated as their team will look at active threats and deal with them before they are even a problem. Monthly meetups are also great in obtaining our needs as well as showing us what is new and in the horizon.
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Cisco always provides good support for all of their solutions. As usual, Cisco support is top notch, from their initial sales teams to the post support, we have always felt comfortable with using Cisco solutions. Their documentation is also very good, frequent updates to the documents with feature enhancements and support notes. All around very good suppot
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In-Person Training
There was no in person training.
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No answers on this topic
Online Training
Takes a lot to get a 10 out of 10.
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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Ensure system administration and exchange admin are up to speed on Avanan
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The implementation went well, no issues or problems to report.
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Alternatives Considered
I have used Cisco's secure Email, one of the major dislike is User Interface that is buggy and not user friendly. It does not update it's database for spam sites. Integration process takes much time whereas Avanan takes very less time. Cisco Secure Email sometimes deletes the important emails and that is worst where as Avanan has good AI/ML integration there are very rare false positive in deleting emails.
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Cisco SETD, with a broad deployment and full integration with Microsoft 365 gives us a strong protection, especially where we can leverage its strengths: Microsoft‑365 integration, mailbox remediation, policy enforcement, and your visibility across Cisco tools.


Proofpoint is better around user awareness (warning tags etc.), and continuity/archiving. Considering that we have a full Cisco stack, choosing Proofpoint would come with higher cost, learning curve, possible redundancy of features, licensing complexity.
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Scalability
It does what they claim and then some.
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • Improved risk mitigation by providing additional layer protection for M365.
  • Easy to setup and configure. No expert knowledge required and no downtime required.
  • Customizable license count. No need to buy the same number of mailbox users if you really don't want to protect some unused mailboxes.
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  • Up time is as close to 100% as you can get
  • Tuning is pretty straight forward and Cisco support is there to help with special tweaks and filter options. At no charge
  • Support access is pretty easy to get
  • Email threat, filtering, and geolocation verification is updated very regularly
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ScreenShots

Avanan Screenshots

Screenshot of Avanan Security DashboardScreenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of

Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense Screenshots

Screenshot of an Impact Report showing efficacy metrics and ROI indicatorsScreenshot of a detailed view of phishing messagesScreenshot of the dashboard