Abnormal Security offers comprehensive email security with advanced threat detection, focusing on its behavioral AI engine to analyze email activity and identify anomalies that deviate from normal user behavior. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 stands out for its robust threat protection capabilities, seamless integration with Microsoft applications. Both need to enhance integration with other platforms to reduce email delays and other issues associated with email forwarding.
The summary above is based on 43 interviews we conducted recently with Abnormal Security and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The features that appeal to me most are the combination of auto-remediation and Detection 360."
"What I like about Abnormal Security is that it notifies me if any of my partners or suppliers are experiencing a security breach by analyzing their database and identifying potential cyber threats."
"I have never encountered any stability issues with Abnormal."
"Ease of use is undoubtedly one of the most valuable features of Abnormal Security."
"It does some really cool stuff that other tools aren't doing. We found it to be really effective, and the AI/ML functionality is really what differentiates them."
"Their ability to take things out of the mailbox and catch things much faster than users is excellent."
"Initial auto-remediation allows us to auto-remediate before the email lands in the end user's inbox for a split second."
"One of the things that I love about them is that the setup and installation are super easy. All you do is give them access to your Microsoft 365 tenant, and through APIs, they are able to do their work. They are doing all this through APIs, so you do not have to install the software and take a month to get it all set up to even see the value of the solution. You could be up and running in less than an hour."
"Does a thorough job of examining email and URLs for malicious content."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a stable solution."
"The solution is very easy to use. All you have to do is to assign the license to the end-user and it's done. The customer will only have the feature activated, and the solution will monitor the emails to determine if they are a threat or not."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is the ease of use."
"It gives us visibility into threats and, for endpoints, it helps us to prioritize threats. We used to have a lack of visibility, but now our time to detect and respond has decreased."
"The initial setup was easy."
"The most valuable feature is protection against malicious links, fishing, and impersonation. You can train people to be aware of these threats, but they're not always careful. When they're using their phones between meetings, they click on a link, and it's game over."
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"There could be room for improvement in enhancing integration with other cybersecurity tools."
"The pricing for academic institutions and student mailboxes is challenging."
"One feature I'd love to see is outbound scanning."
"I, as such, do not have anything that I do not like or would like to add, but you could argue that because they are doing it API-based, there is a chance that something could slip through temporarily before they are able to pull it out. In theory, it could happen just because of the nature of the system. They are not in line with the delivery of the mail. They are kind of asynchronous, which is a pro as well as a con. If it is synchronous, then I know it would always stop them, but because it is asynchronous, things could get through temporarily or because of some system issues on the Microsoft side or their side. It is the nature of the beast, but it is a little bit of a con."
"The ideal scenario would be for Abnormal Security to work in tandem with Microsoft to analyze incoming emails."
"When we're working on something as engineers, and we find an idea or a method of doing something that would be greatly improved by doing it another way, there should be an ability for me to click the ideas button, type in an idea that I have, and submit it to a product review team or developers to have them think through the process a little bit more."
"The biggest pain point for us is the lack of support for on-premise email systems."
"I would like to have the ability to customize the auto-remediation feature."
"I'd like some additional features any product can give me to protect our environment in a better way."
"The XDR dashboard has room for improvement."
"They have moved features from one console to another. Things have been moved around in the interface and it takes me time to find where certain features are."
"The only thing they should improve is the licensing model. They should stop changing it. A year ago, the five features I mentioned were included in one product. Now, three of them are bundled into one product, and you have to pay extra for the other two. I don't mind paying extra, but I don't want them to change it every year or every six months. I need to know what I'm looking at and not worry about it next year."
"Configuration requires going to a lot of places rather than just accessing one tab."
"Microsoft sometimes has downtime, and we'll get several incidents coming in back to back. We have a huge backlog of notifications, many of which may be false positives. However, there might be serious alerts, so we can't risk dismissing all of them at once."
"The company should focus on adding threats that the solution is currently unable to detect."
"The phishing and spam filters could use some improvement."
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Abnormal Security is ranked 12th in Email Security with 8 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is ranked 1st in Email Security with 41 reviews. Abnormal Security is rated 9.6, while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Abnormal Security writes "Provides comprehensive email security management, effective in detecting a wide range of email threats". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 writes "Allows for easy reporting of problems, valuable anti-phishing, and anti-malware support". Abnormal Security is most compared with Mimecast Email Security, Egress Intelligent Email Security, Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security, Avanan and Cisco Secure Email, whereas Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Mimecast Email Security, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Cisco Secure Email and Barracuda Email Security Gateway. See our Abnormal Security vs. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 report.
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