Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Google Workspace

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Score 9.1 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
Google Workspace
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Google Workspace enables teams of all sizes to connect, create and collaborate. It includes productivity and collaboration tools for work: Gmail for custom business email, Drive for cloud storage, Docs for word processing, Meet for video and voice conferencing, Chat for team messaging, Slides for presentation building, and shared Calendars.
$6
per month per user
Pricing
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseGoogle Workspace
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Business Starter
$6
per user/per month
Business Standard
$12
per user/per month
Business Plus
$18
per user/per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseGoogle Workspace
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 DefenseGoogle Workspace
Features
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseGoogle Workspace
Secure Email Gateway
Comparison of Secure Email Gateway features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
8.7
28 Ratings
4% above category average
Google Workspace
-
Ratings
Anti-malware8.716 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizability8.816 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Loss Protection8.215 Ratings00 Ratings
Threat Detection9.528 Ratings00 Ratings
Sandboxing8.115 Ratings00 Ratings
End-to-End Encryption8.816 Ratings00 Ratings
Management Tools8.827 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseGoogle Workspace
Small Businesses
Zoho Mail
Zoho Mail
Score 9.4 out of 10
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.8 out of 10
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.8 out of 10
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseGoogle Workspace
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(28 ratings)
8.6
(120 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
5.0
(2 ratings)
10.0
(5 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(4 ratings)
8.6
(11 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(5 ratings)
2.2
(12 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Cisco Secure Email Threat DefenseGoogle Workspace
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
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!
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Google
I find that google workspace covers all the bases that I would need my day to day work solution to offer. Workspace is perfect if you're someone working in sales who regularly sets up and hosts meetings. The meet solution is reliable, the transcription through Gemini is almost always perfect, and the recording function is easy to use. Calendar backs this up well by being simple and easy to use. Although having the ability to share your calendar link for people to book in meetings would elevate this further. You can also never go wrong with Gmail, it is reliable, has strong spam filters and rarely ever goes down. On the flip side, despite Docs, Slides and Sheets covering the basic functionalities that you would need to create a good base level of documents, it does lack some advanced functionalities that other providers offer. Especially in Sheets, I use sheets regularly for importing and exporting data for cold outreach, it works perfectly fine for this, but if you were looking to start creating dashboards etc using sheets as the base for this, it can start to get a bit tricky and limited.
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Pros
Cisco
  • 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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Google
  • Google Calendar...amazing. I don't need to ask team members when they're busy anymore and play this game of bouncing times back and forth. All I need to do is enter their email address and it shows my calendar and theirs side by side and then select the day and time I find that works best for the both of us.
  • I actually prefer Google Meet over Zoom. Zoom bogs down my computer and I find their UI overcomplicated for what it actually does. Google Meet is simple and does practically everything Zoom does without needing to pay any extra money.
  • Sheets integrates with our CRM (Copper) so it's perfect for us. Being able to export information out of our CRM into sheets and then create pivot tables from that data makes our lives a million times better.
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Cons
Cisco
  • 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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Google
  • Pricing is a little bit higher than other services
  • The cost of each email inbox costs the same whether you want just email or all of the features. For example, we wanted a support email address that we could setup our support desk with. The cost of that added account is the same as the account I use with all of the features.
  • They removed their free tier for small organizations like mine and restricted the free tier from adding new domain names. This was likely due to abuse, but everyone lost the privilege of the free service.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
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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Google
There is no better solution for cloud storage and real time collaboration. The amount of features included in G Suite is unmatched and out of other things we’ve tried over the years, nothing comes close to being as great of a tool.
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Usability
Cisco
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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Google
On the user end, it's great, probably some of the most user friendly products out there. On the admin side, it can get a little more arcane, but it's still better than a lot of other services. At worst I wrangle some CSVs to perform mass changes, but it's a far cry from the days of Powershell scripts or purely manual entry.
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Reliability and Availability
Cisco
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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Google
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Cisco
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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Google
My experiences of getting support have been positive. Calling in is not overly difficult, but it does require getting a PIN. The knowledge of those responding to the calls has been impressive. I have managed to work with them to fix two Google bugs that I had identified. These bugs required a some technical expertise and the support staff were able to understand the issue and forward the concerns to the appropriate persons. The first bug was fixed with 24 hours. The second bug took a little longer, but it was also more complicated to reproduce.
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Implementation Rating
Cisco
The implementation went well, no issues or problems to report.
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Google
nothing to say
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Alternatives Considered
Cisco
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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Google
There are lots of competitors to various tools in Workspace, like Meet versus Zoom. However, Microsoft is the other big competitor I can think of for Google Workspace as a whole. To me, at least, the strength of Workspace is how easy it is to share and collaborate with others. For items that I only need for myself and can keep on my own computer, I typically rely on Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. For items that I need to share, I turn to Workspace a lot. Being able to collaborate in real-time and not having to send documents back and forth is so amazing, and such a time saver. And I love that Workspace is also a built-in tool with Dropbox now.
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Return on Investment
Cisco
  • 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.
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Google
  • Zero to no time managing tools allows us to focus on work saving us time and money
  • Google Workspace allowed us to seamlessly transition to a fully remote workforce when the Coronavirus pandemic started - no lost time or productivity.
  • Easily able to extend our workspace and add features, e.g. Voice, saving us time implementing other services.
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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