Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Clearswift SECURE Email Gateway (SEG)

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

The CS SEG appliances are running as virtual appliances by now. They do need not much power in the ESX environment. I recommend to use at least two peers running in a cluster. The cluster feature is working very well. The CS SEG can process a huge number of emails in a very short time frame.

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

• CS SEG is fast in email processing
• Managing the quarantine is easy
• Display of the reasons why an email has been processed this is very detailed

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

• Improvement is needed in the area of AV/Antispam update processing (internally)
• Improvement is needed in the log file processing. Many log file entries are not understandable for an operator or administrator without special insider knowledge
• Clearswift has recently changed the support provider. Now there are no german supporters anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Clearswift Secure Email Gateway (CS SEG) has very low license costs. A two peer cluster is enough to run a complete emailing gateway environment. Compared to the Proofpoint PPS the CS SEG does not need a management appliance. The CS SEG peers can manage the quarantine by themselves. This is easy to use and quite fast.

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

• Since this CS SEG environment is operated for a customer, I cannot answer this question

Incentivized