KnowBe4 PhishER/PhishER Plus vs. Proofpoint Email Protection

PhishER comes with some good features, such as PhishML, PhishRIP, PhishFlip, etc. These features help us manage phishing email reporting incidents. From reporting emails via Phish Alert Button plug-in to collecting all reported emails in one place at the PhishER dashboard. Now, the PhishML comes into play, scanning all reported emails and tagging each as clean, spam, or threat. With the help of this machine learning-based algorithm, our investigation process becomes easier. Other features, such as PhishRip, help to search and quarantine phishing emails, and PhishFlip converts a real phishing campaign to a test phishing campaign.

Incentivized

Well suited: Proofpoint does a pretty good job at protecting us from spam emails. I was able to block a lot of emails coming from SendGrid by blocking SendGrid emails with a custom spam filter. However, SendGrid has a lot of legit emails too so I was able to create another rule to allow those emails from certain people, then block the rest. That way business need was met but spam emails are blocked. Less Appropriate If you are trying to monitor internal to internal emails Proofpoint is probably a little over featured for that.

Incentivized

• One platform that integrates reported emails and using PhishFlip to educated staff.
• Automation to remove malicious emails from mailboxes.
• Instantly report back to users if an email is safe or malicious.
• Easily review vital technical information to help you make a decision if an email is a threat.
• Allow comments to be left from staff and IT.

Incentivized

• Spam - catches these emails before hitting the inbox.
• Daily digest - provides users with a list of the emails that were blocked and allows them to choose to release them if they are legitimate emails.
• Ensures that emails coming into our organization is safe for our users and verifies the email is coming from stated senders email server.

Incentivized

• Issues with Global Blocklist
• Email Template Modification - Simplification
• Target Specific Users vs. Groups
• PhishRIP info tabs (i.e. if improperly check ripped emails are turned into tests. This has caused issues.) Info tabs or markers allow user to hover and get more information about what action a check box or slider provides.

Incentivized

• Proofpoint could offer more frequent training opportunities to customers at all levels of expertise.
• Proofpoint can always continue to strive to keep its product a leader in the industry.
• Proofpoint's support site could be overhauled to provide a more logical flow.

Incentivized

When we first discovered that KnowBe4 released something like this, we saw a demo of it and were floored at what it could do and how it could help us from a security standpoint. Gone are the days of us in IT sending out a mass email saying please don't click on anything in the email from sender "X", and it allows us to quietly and easily ensure that people don't take any action on malicious emails.

Incentivized

I give it an eight for the feature set. While I only give it an eight because the complexity and interconnectedness of the tools mean that there needs to be quite a bit of RTFM to get the most out of the products.

Incentivized

Very robust and solid product in protecting our emails. The engineers who assisted with our implementation was very knowledgable and great to work with. Easy to use by end-users. Administration and management are also easy for IT. Great dashboard and reporting tools for business reviews.

There were no appliance errors or unplanned outages during five years of operation.

Incentivized

Most important thing is the performance of processing mails. Even in a complex environment the system keeps performing on a very high Level.

Incentivized

I haven't needed to reach out to support very often, but when I have the responses have been timely and have provided the solutions I have needed. The support has been friendly and have always been able to resolve any issues that have come up.

Incentivized

We use ProofPoint support quite often to fix issues and assist with setting up features and rules. Each time we have created a ticket, they have been very helpful and respectful. Each ticket has been treated with the appropriate SLA time and attention. We also enjoy the regular check-ins from the engineers when tickets are open but we get busy with other tasks.

Incentivized

It was very simple to implement - with just a few settings needed to connect it to our O365 environment

Incentivized

Harmony does not provide security awareness training or simulated phishing emails like KnowB4. However, it does provide a phish alert button & workflow similar to PhishER & we may stop using PhishER because the Phish Alert reports from PhishER don't feed into Harmony to help train it from phishing emails that go through. We got Harmony after KnowB4 because we needed a tool to PREVENT phishing emails from getting to people's inboxes in the first place, which KnowB4 has very little capability for other than PhishER+ blacklists. It is a shame KnowB4 does not have the anti threat phishing prevention like Harmony considering all the email data it has & its existing AI analytic capabilities.

Incentivized

We previously used halon anti-spam, which lasted us well until our organization really started to grow and it was not able to keep up with the amount of mail we were receiving. The support is also nothing compared to Proofpoint's professional services offering. Halon was also not able to have the complex rules that Proofpoint can offer.

Incentivized

You can add a lot of agents to your environment if you need them. And you can operate hardware appliances and virtual appliances in the same cluster.

Incentivized

• Phish/ER & PAD: Identifying email threats more quickly allowed us to send alert to the users' community in a timely manner based on the pattern of the threat.
• KnowBe4 Training Campaigns have proven to noticeably increase users' awareness.
• KnowBe4 Phishing Campaigns made users realize how dangerous and deceiving hacker can be.

Incentivized

• Having easy-to-reach backups of all employee emails has made Proofpoint worth it by itself. That plus the countless times that spam/malicious emails did not make it through to the intended person that could have potentially cost the organization a lot of money.

Incentivized