Avanan vs. Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Zoho Mail

What it says, it provides. It has the Data leak prevention that is the major help while we have to deal with lot of clients at a time. It has the Secure Click that checks any embedded hyperlink so that when we work on emails we don't have to worry about the hidden security threats inside a email.

I will certainly recommend Cisco Secure Email to my friends/colleagues, one look at the dashboard/statistics will actually convince any IT professional to use this product. We noticed an outstanding improvement in Email quality, most of the SPAM emails are caught, and our users have never been happier!

Incentivized

If you don't have a huge budget and want something that works with minor quirks here and there then Zoho Mail is definitely something you should look into. For half the price of Google G Suite or Office account you get 5GB of storage per user and can send up to 25MB emails without restrictions. Great for small businesses in my opinion. I have had some issues with their spam filter, but we use SpamTitan and just shut off the one that comes with Zoho Mail. Zoho's spam filter isn't horrible but you should definitely use something in addition or instead of what comes with Zoho.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• I really like that there is a free version in which a single user can be created. It is really useful because it allows you to evaluate each characteristic of the service without having to buy it.
• I also really like the visual aspect of the inbox, which is partially customizable. Because you can make small changes such as changing the color, the language, and among other things.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• It does allow for notifications for various things, but I am not sure where to turn them all off
• It only counts to 9 the unread email alert, then says 9+
• Overall I don't think there is much they need to work on.

Incentivized

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).

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The end-users love not having their inboxes fill up with extra useless emails. As an administrator, it is simple to implement and maintain. The ability to put something into test mode before going live makes our life a lot easier and less stressful. Avanan has many different components to make your life easier.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It is very easy to use and does all you need. It sends newsletters to their own folder. A notification folder for more important things. The Spam folder collect the right amount of spam emails

Incentivized

Always been available as needed.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It's not all the time, on occasion the platform can delay email by seven to ten minutes.

Incentivized

Support has always been there for me, they take on suggestions and product improvements quite seriously. I've spoken to techs and you can tell that they care about the product and the service in which they deliver. Avanan support is always responsive in everything I throw them and in most cases they don't tell me how to build out a widget or custom query, they actually do it for me and send it to me.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I have spoken with Zoho several times and their support is always friendly and helpful. I have always been asked for security pins and codes when seeking assistance which helps me to feel my accounts are secure and I have never had to wait on hold to speak with someone for more than 5 minutes. They always seem to have someone available to help. If you call asking for instructions on how to do something they gladly walk you through the process and if you just need something done and don't have time to do it yourself they will happily customize whatever you need without you having to spend all day with it.

Incentivized

There was no in person training.

Incentivized

Takes a lot to get a 10 out of 10.

Incentivized

Ensure system administration and exchange admin are up to speed on Avanan

Incentivized

The implementation went well, no issues or problems to report.

Incentivized

Avanan has a one-click solution, which subscribers or clients use to deploy a new security update. Further, Avanan has the protection of any cloud application, which means, it bypasses any security threat and maintain the set safety processes. Finally, data leakage is a shield that Avanan has deployed, a very smooth process in the firm.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Zoho is free. Also, there is no need for a separate IT guy for creating mail, or if any issues come you don't have to find anyone anyone can check and fix all issues from their super admin panel. Zoho overview is much better than outlook and its appearance of getting mail popup and functionality is better than outlook. My friend suggested for this and also after using I have referred my friend

It does what they claim and then some.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Our email security has increased.
• Users are now more confident about their email security.
• Management of threat detection and prevention has become easier.
• Finer controls on spam filtering gives customization capability.
• GDPR compliance ensures peace of mind from a regulation point of view.
• The quarantine feature has ensured that we do not lose important emails while they are being analyzed.

Incentivized

• It has a direct impact on the commercial communications of the company since with this application we send the economic proposals for services.
• Thanks to the fact that we can configure our corporate domain and a signature, we show a corporate professional image.
• Allows you to manage and store internal and external communications

Incentivized