Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Proofpoint Essentials for Small Business

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Proofpoint Essentials
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Proofpoint Essentials provides protection against spam, phishing and other email threats, as well as social media protection, user roles and restrictions, and other protections oriented around the needs of small business.N/A
Pricing
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseProofpoint Essentials for Small Business
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseProofpoint Essentials
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseProofpoint Essentials for Small Business
Features
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseProofpoint Essentials for Small Business
Secure Email Gateway
Comparison of Secure Email Gateway features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
8.4
Ratings
1% above category average
Proofpoint Essentials for Small Business
9.7
Ratings
15% above category average
Anti-malware8.70 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Customizability8.80 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Data Loss Protection8.20 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Threat Detection8.90 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Sandboxing8.10 Ratings10.00 Ratings
End-to-End Encryption8.80 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Management Tools7.20 Ratings9.00 Ratings
User Ratings
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseProofpoint Essentials for Small Business
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
5.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseProofpoint Essentials for Small Business
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Read full review
Proofpoint Essentials for Small Business is well suited for users up to 500, for Office 365 (Microsoft’s cloud-based email and collaboration platform).
Read full review
Pros
  • 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.
Read full review
  • Proofpoint catches all the junk emails (spam, phishing, etc.).
  • Light-weight solution, easy to deploy, configure and manage.
  • Fast and easy tracking of inbound and outbound emails.
  • Quarantine Digest emails - makes reviewing of junk emails to be very simple process
  • Analysis of URLs and attachments makes email system to be more safe.
Read full review
Cons
  • 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
Read full review
  • It will be great to have a TAP Dashboard in Essentials
  • Export data to the SIEM
  • Customized Policy
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
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.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Usability
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
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
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.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
The implementation went well, no issues or problems to report.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
Read full review
As already wrote, Proofpoint is perfect solution to be deployed quickly without requiring any additional resources or services. Good email tracking logs, excellent reporting features. Great filtering mechanism. Cost effective pricing.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • 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
Read full review
  • It has helped capture malicious emails trying to get company logins and info
  • It has helped stop viruses that were sent to emails
  • I am not a financial type but I think it has been worth the price
Read full review
ScreenShots

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