Proofpoint Email Protection vs. Sophos Email

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Proofpoint Email Protection
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Proofpoint Email Protection is available as an on-premise or cloud based solution and blocks unwanted, malicious and impostor emails with granular search capabilities and visibility into all messages. Outbound controls include encryption and data loss prevention, while continuity capabilities ensure business communications can continue as normal in the event of an email outage. With Proofpoint's Email Protection, you can protect your people, data, and brand from today’s threats…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
Proofpoint Email ProtectionSophos Email
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Proofpoint Email ProtectionSophos Email
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Proofpoint Email ProtectionSophos Email
Considered Both Products
Proofpoint Email Protection
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
More flexibility to create rules and custom rules; in the on-premises version, these options grow up due to the possibility of access to the command line.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
Proofpoint Email Protection allows configuration and granularity that far exceeds those features we'd been able to use with the Barracuda Email Security Gateway product. In addition, the robust Proofpoint reporting features give us and our decision makers much improved detail …
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection needs to improve a lot to catch up to Proofpoint's abilities and features. We used ATP for a year but malicious emails were slipping through. Proofpoint was much more efficient in catching malicious emails. With ATP the …
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
As a previous Exchange administrator, ProofPoint allowed us to move many security-based mail flow rules into the system. This simplified our Exchange mail flow and allowed for more detailed and concise rules.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
We use Symantec DLP for our on-premise protection of endpoints and network traffic. We used to use it for email, but switched to Proofpoint due to the entire business deciding to move to it. We are just one of multiple teams using Proofpoint. I believe Proofpoint was decided …
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
It was only possible to select "Ironport Web Security Appliance" but this has nothing to do with emailing. Actually, we are using Cisco Ironport Email Security in another environment. The administration and management of Proofpoint Email Protection is way more straightforward …
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
I was not involved in the side by side with other products.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
I have used MessageLabs. Instead of relying on signatures and heuristics for spam detection effectiveness, Proofpoint's spam detection is based on machine learning technology and that is really helpful for overall protection.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
Works very well - probably much better in terms of feature set and customisability. The quality of message filtering is fantastic. But from an administrative perspective it is more difficult to manage than the others.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
At the time we selected Proofpoint, Mimecast did not offer comparable features. We are planning to evaluate Mimecast in the first quarter of 2020.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
We currently have Microsoft ATP turned on behind Proofpoint and Proofpoint's TAP. ATP almost never alerts us to any issues due to the filtering by Proofpoint.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
We had been using Proofpoint for a number of years but there were a few things PP was not doing so well. So we looked at Mimecast and was seriously considering moving to it, however, Mimecast has 1 fatal flaw they were not able to resolve to our satisfaction so we stuck with …
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
I thought that Proofpoint immediately showed improvements over these products and allowed us to become more "granular" than the mentioned products.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
Proofpoint is the leader of the pack when it comes to email security services. I have used a range of other providers in the space and Proofpoint is the best. It's ability to identify and block malicious email and threats sets it above all other competitors.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
I belong to a few tech user boards, and compared to Mimecast, Proofpoint's uptime over the past year has been much better.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
We evaluated a few other products and found Proofpoint to be the best fit for our organization.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
We used Barracuda at one point but the price was going up and the performance and features went down or went away all together. Proofpoint has definitely proven to be an amazing product.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
Proofpoint meets all the security requirements stipulated in the company's policies, has a good platform administration, is easy to implement, has very robust research tools, the reports help our security operations center, good support, flexibility of working in the cloud, and …
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
I would recommend Proofpoint over any other product in this space thanks to Proofpoint's amazing customer service and true-to-their-word email security spam and malware detection systems.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
We have used EOP (Exchange Online Protection) in the past and we also had a POC with Proofpoint which we were excited to use and the results were positive.

Before Proofpoint, we had many issues with imposters and TAP issues with EOP, which have been improved with Proofpoint. We …
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
Proofpoint stacks up well against competitors, but I'm choosing not to disclose who the platform replaced.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
I am not sure what else is out there so I can't really speak to how well it stacks up against others. I can say that it seems to be pretty good for us. It's robust and has good customization. It also has other systems within the Proofpoint family that it works with fairly well.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
It's definitely better and more robust and reliable than our previous solution (McAfee Email Gateway), but when compared to Mimecast they are pretty much on par. Both solutions offer a very good solution to email security.
Chose Proofpoint Email Protection
I have used Symantec Brightmail, Cisco Ironport, and Trend Micro Email Security.
We selected Trend's product due to the price, but it failed miserably at clustering and overall email delivery. Proofpoint came in second as it checked off a lot of the boxes that we required in …
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
Proofpoint Email ProtectionSophos Email
Secure Email Gateway
Comparison of Secure Email Gateway features of Product A and Product B
Proofpoint Email Protection
8.0
Ratings
4% below category average
Sophos Email
7.3
Ratings
13% below category average
Anti-malware10.00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Customizability7.00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Data Loss Protection6.00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Threat Detection8.00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Sandboxing7.00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
End-to-End Encryption10.00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Management Tools8.00 Ratings6.70 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Proofpoint Email ProtectionSophos Email
Small Businesses
Zoho Mail
Zoho Mail
Score 9.3 out of 10
Zoho Mail
Zoho Mail
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.4 out of 10
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.4 out of 10
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Proofpoint Email ProtectionSophos Email
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
7.5
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
1.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.3
(0 ratings)
2.8
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Proofpoint Email ProtectionSophos Email
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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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
  • 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.
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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
  • The pricing is high and there are many licenses for things I feel should be part of other products.
  • The UI is slightly dated and has a lot of room for improvement.
  • The separate products should have one pane of glass for administration. Currently, if you own several of the products it feels quite disjointed when using them.
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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
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.
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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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Reliability and Availability
There were no appliance errors or unplanned outages during five years of operation.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
Most important thing is the performance of processing mails. Even in a complex environment the system keeps performing on a very high Level.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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.
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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
Proofpoint Email Protection allows configuration and granularity that far exceeds those features we'd been able to use with the Barracuda Email Security Gateway product. In addition, the robust Proofpoint reporting features give us and our decision makers much improved detail to make informed decisions about our security posture.
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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Scalability
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.
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • 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.
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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