Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense vs. Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection (TAP)

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

Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection is a great security application for notifying our team about when our users click on malicious links. It provides a good explanation of the attack scenario, including the Sender, Subject, as well as other users that this attack has been sent to. It is also very useful in helping provide metrics on what types of attacks have been sent to the organization historically.

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

• Impostor email detection is a fantastic feature and works very well.
• The sandbox feature helps to ensure confidence that their evaluation of the email threat is valid.
• Easy to use (and understand) dashboard make identifying and managing email threats a breeze.

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

• Their admin web GUI is cumbersome and unclear in many ways. The learning curve is steep so you have to stay up on things yourself whenever a new feature or service is added.
• They sometimes add a feature to their toolbox without informing their customers. This is true even when the feature added does not cost extra.

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

Not my decision, but I have made it very clear this product does not perform. I have emails from our users on how bad it is after switching to it.

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

The interface is simple to use but still contains the information needed to conduct thorough investigations. If you own licenses for other Proofpoint tools, Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection is easily accessible from those applications. The ability to sandbox URLs within the TAP interface is a great feature as well. The overall performance of the GUI is seamless, especially if enabled with your organization's SSO.

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

Generally have had good response and resolution time with knowledgeable technicians, and if needed the ticket is moved to someone with more expertise to better address the issue. Have used the ticketing portal, phone, as well as the beta chat feature (permanent please!)

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Proofpoint managed the installation and made it very simple. We had a dedicated installation engineer who checked in on use periodically after go-live to ensure that there were no issue.

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

This is the first product of its kind that I've used personally. The last 3 companies that I worked for also used Proofpoint, which includes Proofpoint Targeted Attack Protection, so I don't have a way to really compare it. I have seen that it is a leader in the industry.

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

• Saves IT time when an attack is successful and isn't reported in a timely manner or at all until damages are done. IT has to spend less time and effort because we are able to stop it before it spreads.
• Protecting business resources and assets is a huge positive impact. TAP allows us to better protect our business and information within.
• The only negative thing is that it doesn't automatically handle these attacks - but that is what TRAP is for! I wish Proofpoint bundled TAP and TRAP.

Incentivized