AppRiver from OpenText vs. Sophos Email

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AppRiver from OpenText
Score 4.5 out of 10
N/A
AppRiver from OpenText (formerly from Zix from 2019, which was acquired by OpenText), is a hosted messaging gateway and security platform featuring anti-spam and email encryption / data loss capability.N/A
Sophos Email
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Sophos Email is presented as Predictive Cloud Email Security Powered by Artificial Intelligence designed to block spam and malware, as well as protect employees and block phishing attempts.N/A
Pricing
AppRiver from OpenTextSophos Email
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AppRiver from OpenTextSophos Email
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AppRiver from OpenTextSophos Email
Considered Both Products
AppRiver from OpenText
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
At the time, Rackspace was too expensive, and Microsoft only sold to partners. AppRiver was reasonable and easy to work with. Now AppRiver from Zix, will only host our clients: They will not handle any support for our customers, as they use to.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
From AppRiver to Office 365, the support crew was exceptionally detailed and helpful. For new users, distribution groups, members on lists, and adding supplementary email addresses to current profiles for my teams, they led me through the process.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
AppRiver wins for customer support, cost, efficiency, and speed.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
AppRiver takes Microsoft 365 and simplifies the billing, provisioning, and support, to the point that we no longer have to deal with Microsoft directly, are able to simply focus on the product, rather than all the settings, setup, and all the other headaches typically …
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
AppRiver provides extra services that our previous email service provider did not. SharePoint had extra email security features - for the price.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
We evaluated several other vendors that I won't mention by name but found their partner program to be less attractive. If you are already using Office 365, give AppRiver a try. I think you will be pleased.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
I have no experience with other platforms.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
I used to love Rackspace but they have dropped. I still have some customers using their hosting but I'm slowly bringing them over to AppRiver.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
Sherweb: looked at them, but after talking and researching what other users were saying, we decided to use AppRiver. AppRiver's tech support wins out every time.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
Never used similar product.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
AppRiver's securetide spam filter is good, but I will say, it's the one product we moved away from. We switched to ProofPoint for email threat protection, and ProofPoint's quarantine notice and some other advanced features, at the time of our switch, were clear improvements …
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
We have been using AppRiver since our company inception and have not had any reason to look elsewhere or consider other options. We continue to be pleased with AppRiver.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
Many clients use GoDaddy for their email hosting. If you want to see a night and day difference in support, AppRiver is the way to go. I hate waiting on hold with GoDaddy, transferring through their automated menus, finding clients trapped in year-long commitments for email …
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
We switched for a reason.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
At the time, 5 years ago, we switched from Intermedia to Appriver based on price and portal features. AppRiver had better pricing, did support themselves, and integrated Office 365 into their own customer portal for easy management. They were the only ones at the time. I cannot …
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
We have not evaluated any other products offered by AppRiver other than what we currently use. We have what we need.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
There was one other company that I evaluated in the area but clearly made my decision based on a recommendation from someone that was also an AppRiver customer.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
In the past, we have just gone directly through Microsoft. This was generally easy, and the support Techs knowledgeable, but could take an hour to get to a tech and the tech was often difficult to understand. Microsoft is trying to discourage going directly through them now, …
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
Initially we were using Microsoft Office 365 for licensing, an on-premise Exchange server for e-mail, and The E-mail Laundry for spam filtering. After months of unsuccessful attempts to migrate our e-mail to Office 365, AppRiver was the only solution that successfully …
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
We used Postini as our email filtering for a couple of years until it was purchased by Google. We continued on with Google because we didn't want to have the pain of migrating to another platform. But, we research and decided on AppRiver. The migration over was very simple and …
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
Spamtitan doesn't have as much granular settings, but it is far superior at blocking malicious emails.
Chose AppRiver from OpenText
As Trend Micros WFBS is a whole suite I don't expect it to have the same capabilities and or performance as a dedicated service.
Scanning times are greatly reduced using a cloud-based service as I don't have to provide CPU and Ram to a VM to sit scanning emails or relegate my …
Sophos Email
Chose Sophos Email
Featurewise, stacks up well. Chosen for integration into other Sophos products, and additional data/insights provided across our entire Sophos estate.
Chose Sophos Email
Many other solutions are a complicated setup and take a lot of time for the configuration. With Sophos email we were setup and seeing data/emails within an hour. As I have described the ease of use from a high-level for someone like me a Director just peeking into the system or …
Chose Sophos Email
I am not familiar with other products at this point. I came into the IT field using Sophos Reflexion and moved to the new Sophos Email Security once the option was available simply because of our experience with Reflexion. While using Reflexion, we encountered numerous examples …
Chose Sophos Email
Sophos email is a lot easier to manage.
Chose Sophos Email
Sophos is better than the McAfee email gateway. Depending on which license for Defender you have it could be better or worse.
Chose Sophos Email
I was not part of selecting Sophos for this organization. I would recommend a full POC before landing on this as your decision. Some things that you should test for are targeted credential harvesting sites, impersonation rules processing, and general consistency in the …
Chose Sophos Email
I have only tried Sophos Email, and I find it to be a very useful tool, as it protects against information leakage such as fraudulent emails, cloud sandboxing and quarantine, which are essential functions and the product works excellent.
Chose Sophos Email
We had tried Broadcom (formerly Message Labs). It lacks encryption, and the customer service and invoices were terrible. The console was outdated and not easy to navigate. We were limited to a few options and very basic options when it came to troubleshooting or managing users. …
Chose Sophos Email
My experience is mostly with Google's G-Suite spam filtering and, as an end user, a different spam filtering group (which I cannot remember at this time). Sophos Secure Email Gateways seems to be much better at keeping things out of my inbox than either of the other solutions. …
Chose Sophos Email
Sophos is not head and shoulders above any of these competitors, as it's a very closely knit race. Security and email transmission security are one of the highest priorities out there in technology. The world is slowly moving forward, and all of these vendors are leading the …
Chose Sophos Email
Sophos was chosen for our location based on a need for increased security as we deal with sensitive information on a daily basis.
Chose Sophos Email
MS Exchange has the capabilities of out of the box workflow (as described previously), however, we managed to customize Sophos to do semi-manual workflow which is still acceptable. And more the encryption methods of Sophos has been proven by us to be more suitable. And the …
Chose Sophos Email
Deployment features, system stability and rate of threat protection are the main reasons I would go with Sophos Email Protection. Systems like Barracuda email protection seem nice, but the RBLs that they use could be stronger and perhaps use the "Cloud" information system more …
Features
AppRiver from OpenTextSophos Email
Secure Email Gateway
Comparison of Secure Email Gateway features of Product A and Product B
AppRiver from OpenText
8.5
Ratings
2% above category average
Sophos Email
7.3
Ratings
14% below category average
Anti-malware9.80 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Customizability8.90 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Data Loss Protection6.90 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Threat Detection9.70 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Sandboxing6.70 Ratings7.80 Ratings
End-to-End Encryption9.00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Management Tools8.60 Ratings6.70 Ratings
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AppRiver from OpenTextSophos Email
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Enterprises
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All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AppRiver from OpenTextSophos Email
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(0 ratings)
7.5
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
1.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.4
(0 ratings)
2.8
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AppRiver from OpenTextSophos Email
Likelihood to Recommend
I would highly recommend AppRiver for inbound email filtering. We have been very pleased with the performance and the ease of use. The occasional email does get through, but I have had that happen on any email filtering we have used in the past. Great product and great support as well
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I strongly believe that if you are looking for a product that does what it says on the box and has the capacity to keep your company safe, you should look at Sophos. They have consistently been at the top of their game and continue to provide a product that meets the ever-changing needs of the threat landscape.
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Pros
  • Ease of management for a MSP. Even though there is no integration w/ PSA tools currently, I don't see this as a negative. The management is multi-tenant and simple to navigate.
  • Support via chat is fast and very competent. Only downside is they are just available during extended business hours, not 24x7 on the chat.
  • Reselling Office 365 is very simple and gives us an advantage over our competitors. Includes pre sales support and post sale support.
  • Encrypted email services act much like others, it works very well and includes and Outlook Plug in to make it obvious you intend to send messaged encrypted.
  • Email continuity. Email queuing is included, so if your onsite server goes down, mail queues at the spam filter until service is restored. You can step it up w/ their email continuity service which give you access to your mail at the spam filter in cases where your mail server is down for an extended period of time.
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  • We could customize it to have a certain level of workflow. We manage to enforce certain email (based on key-phrases) to be quarantined before send it to the recipient. And the email needs to be approved (manually) before being released.
  • For certain type (using regex) of email, we will encrypt it if it's sent outside our organization domain.
  • Scalable
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Cons
  • We had an issue with bills coming to us instead of going directly to the client that took a little longer to fix than we would have preferred.
  • It would be nice if the bills included the domain name. When I was receiving my client's bill, it was difficult to tell which domains the bill was for.
  • Cost a little more than from Microsoft directly.
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  • Reporting could be more granular, it's the most glaring weakness of the product.
  • The ability to drill down into data from the dashboard would be very helpful for reporting as well.
  • Reverse AD sync so when active directory users are removed, they are removed from Sophos as well would be helpful.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
It was easy to use and easy to implement. You don't need previous knowledge on the products, after we got this up and running, it took us hours to put everything together. The transition was easy and seamless.
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Usability
AppRiver is very easy to use. A new employee can begin using it on their first day.
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The solution is very scalable, with a possibility to be customized; which means that Sophos Email can be configured depending on our own situation and context not on a general way. On the other hand, Sophos Email has a broad feature set; I mean, along with core spam and malware protection, Sophos offers advanced features such as real-time
link following, threat isolation, spoof protection, etc.
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Support Rating
AppRiver's live support is above what I expected, and I use it exclusively. I always get a professional, courteous, and knowledgeable tech that is easy to understand within a few minutes of placing a call. If you do have to leave a message they have always promptly returned my call.
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I have always found the answers I have needed in the documentation or online, and have not needed to contact Sophos Secure Email Gateways' support team. This, I think, bodes well for how their software is easy to use and has good documentation when you cannot find what you need in the basic interface.
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Alternatives Considered
AppRiver takes Microsoft 365 and simplifies the billing, provisioning, and support, to the point that we no longer have to deal with Microsoft directly, are able to simply focus on the product, rather than all the settings, setup, and all the other headaches typically associated with setting up a Microsoft365 Tenant.
Read full review
Many other solutions are a complicated setup and take a lot of time for the configuration. With Sophos email we were setup and seeing data/emails within an hour. As I have described the ease of use from a high-level for someone like me a Director just peeking into the system or an analyst that can do a deep dive is one of the best users interfaces I have seen for any product.
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Return on Investment
  • We were able to drop our email scanning software that was taking hours to clear the cache of emails daily. The reduction in delays on email scanning improved our efficiency as emails take seconds to minutes to get to where they are going not hours.
  • Encrypted email service (Cypher-Post) is difficult to use as well as our recipients do not like how difficult it is to use. The stub emails that contain links often get deleted because people are trained not to click on links in emails. This has caused substantial delays in people getting emails from us.
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  • We have prevented several cases of employees tried to steal organization's information; this has a great effect on the ROI not only in dollars but also in our reputation.
  • We have used it for more than 4 years, which is more than typical technology adoption we usually do; and this is the result of the above causes (prevention of internal fraud).
  • Need to have an expert of regex to accommodate more advanced DLP function/requirements
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ScreenShots