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Proofpoint Email Protection vs Sophos Phish Threat comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 2, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.1
Proofpoint Email Protection reduces phishing and false positives, enhances security, saves time, lowers costs, and improves operational efficiency.
Sentiment score
4.8
Sophos Phish Threat provides ROI by educating users, reducing ransomware incidents, and enhancing organizational security through training.
The ideal situation would be to have all these portals combined into one unified dashboard.
Information Security Architect at Loews Hotels
After Proofpoint Email Protection, phishing has been completely eliminated, so it is working very efficiently.
Security Engineer at News Corp
The time required for email investigations and responses has changed with Proofpoint Email Protection's visibility and automation.
Sr Security Engineer at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Proofpoint Email Protection is valued for responsiveness and usefulness, though some users experience inconsistent support and documentation issues.
Sentiment score
6.1
Sophos offers excellent customer support, praised for responsive, expert service and enhanced by Cyberoam staff integration, often resolving issues efficiently.
I am familiar with the granular policy control feature of Proofpoint Email Protection, and I find their support excellent for modifying those policies.
Senior Cybersecurity Specialist at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Even the engineers have been helpful, and if we open a case, they get back to us right away.
Information Security Analyst at a government with 11-50 employees
We always contact them if we need support, whether it's for setting up features or technical support, which is very responsive.
System Administrator at Tutt Bryant Group
They call whenever you have an incident and keep calling to assist until you solve the issue.
Supervisor, Infraestructura Information Technology at Refineria Dominicana de Petroleo
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Proofpoint Email Protection offers highly scalable, flexible architecture, efficiently managing high-volume traffic and supporting various business sizes and domains.
Sentiment score
6.1
Sophos Phish Threat is highly scalable, offering seamless user additions and effective performance across various organization sizes with cloud support.
Proofpoint is scalable for multi-site organizations with thousands of users.
Products and solutions director at ITVikings
The solution provides a graphical representation and dashboard view showing how many threats are getting blocked on a daily and monthly basis.
Information Technology Team Lead at a manufacturing company with 201-500 employees
Proofpoint Email Protection is considered to be highly scalable, designed for large enterprises, with a cloud-based architecture that offers an enormous number of options, including multi-organization support and high-volume email handling.
Senior Solution Delivery Lead Cybersecurity at International Olympic Committee – IOC
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.3
Proofpoint Email Protection is highly stable, reliable, and well-supported, with rare minor lags, rated nearly ten by users.
Sentiment score
7.3
Sophos Phish Threat is stable, reliable, with minimal issues reported, but some users suggest potential for improvement.
If Proofpoint Email Protection has an outage, we are either not receiving emails or not blocking the right threats.
Senior Security Engineer at Cloudflare
Regarding the stability and performance of Proofpoint Email Protection, I have not experienced any crashes, downtimes, or performance issues.
Cyber Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Proofpoint Email Protection is very stable and reliable, as it remains accessible at all times without issues, ensuring that data is available in real time.
Principal Consultant at Infosys
 

Room For Improvement

Proofpoint Email Protection requires interface improvement, enhanced AI, better support, integration, pricing, false positive reduction, and training.
Sophos Phish Threat needs improvements in pricing, security, user interface, training, integrations, current simulations, and language options.
The older legacy user interface just took a little to work with, and the new unified interface, as it was able to do more and more of the functionality of the old one, the product just got easier and easier to use.
Sr Security Engineer at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
In addition to the UI improvements, I would appreciate an increase in the speed of the tasks being processed on the pod.
Security Specialist at a leisure / travel company with 10,001+ employees
There are pros and cons to that, but I would suggest maintaining a good balance between security protection and operational impact.
Senior Security Engineer at Cloudflare
The catalog is very small compared with products such as Terranova or KnowBe4.
Supervisor, Infraestructura Information Technology at Refineria Dominicana de Petroleo
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise users find Proofpoint Email Protection costly but value its robust security, though some seek cheaper alternatives.
Sophos Phish Threat's tiered pricing is competitive, with annual subscriptions preferred, covering user numbers and firewall integration.
Customers pay around $90,000 yearly for a 1,000-user organization, with the subscription license being the main expense, apart from implementation fees.
Products and solutions director at ITVikings
Given my other experience with other vendors, I think they are a bit on the high end and a bit on the pricey end for the email security functionality that we were using.
Sr Security Engineer at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
Although it is a bit costly compared to Mimecast, Defender, and Cofense Vision, it is efficient and strong in security, so I do not mind the cost because I will not reduce my security risk.
Senior Solution Delivery Lead Cybersecurity at International Olympic Committee – IOC
The cost of Sophos Phish Threat is very reasonable for customers as they charge based on usage only.
Senior Information Security Analyst at channelnext
 

Valuable Features

Proofpoint Email Protection offers advanced AI threat detection, granular control, and seamless integration with Office 365 for comprehensive security.
Sophos Phish Threat excels with ease of use, effective training, scalable deployment, detailed reports, and strong technical support.
Without Proofpoint Email Protection, most of these emails would have come through, slipped through Exchange, gotten into the user's mailbox, and created a lot of trouble for the organization.
Cyber Security Engineer at IT Naturally
Proofpoint Email Protection has positively impacted my organization by ensuring we are not at risk of a breach through email.
Release lead at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
TAP alerts, where Proofpoint Email Protection scans emails and sends alerts, provide the ability to review suspicious emails and validate them in a sandbox environment.
Infrastructure Analyst at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
The integration with Sophos Central benefits us for the management of the phishing campaign by being very user-friendly.
Supervisor, Infraestructura Information Technology at Refineria Dominicana de Petroleo
 

Categories and Ranking

Proofpoint Email Protection
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
98
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (1st), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (3rd), Digital Risk Protection (3rd), Office 365 Protection (1st), Secure Email Gateway (SEG) (2nd)
Sophos Phish Threat
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Security Awareness Training (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Proofpoint Email Protection and Sophos Phish Threat aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Proofpoint Email Protection is designed for Secure Email Gateway (SEG) and holds a mindshare of 19.5%, down 22.3% compared to last year.
Sophos Phish Threat, on the other hand, focuses on Security Awareness Training, holds 4.3% mindshare, down 5.0% since last year.
Secure Email Gateway (SEG) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Proofpoint Email Protection19.5%
Microsoft Defender for Office 36517.0%
Mimecast Email and Collaboration Threat Protection15.9%
Other47.6%
Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
Security Awareness Training Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Sophos Phish Threat4.3%
KnowBe413.7%
Riot8.0%
Other74.0%
Security Awareness Training
 

Featured Reviews

Vivek_Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Senior Specialist at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Advanced email defenses have protected healthcare staff and simplified incident response
There are many things that could be improved, but once you are very well-known about this application, you could perform that improvement plan. There are many scenarios where I have worked with Proofpoint Email Protection where a requirement was not fulfilled due to the limitation of the product. For example, we have Report Phish automation. With Proofpoint Email Protection, we can configure Report Phish and forward the email to any email addresses or shared mailboxes that we provide in the configuration. That email is forwarded as is with whatever the user reports as a phishing email. However, some organizations do not want the reported phishing email to go as is into their ticketing tool because it might contain malicious attachments and malicious links that are not required to go into their internal organization. Proofpoint Email Protection has that limitation. They cannot forward or restrict, but could forward only limited information such as some header information, sender subject details, or only limited information. As it is, the email can be forwarded, not as limited information. Proofpoint TRAP solution also has limitations. It cannot create alert notifications for some specific requirements because Proofpoint works the way it is designed, and if you want it to work based on our requirement, that should not be possible. There is a scope of limitations here. There are many improvements that should be made. First, they should work on their false positive minimization. Proofpoint generally takes all emails, investigates them, and classifies them. There are many situations where legit emails are blocked because that domain is found to be under a malicious category somehow, but actually it is not. False positive minimization could be improved, and they could enhance their other applications or solutions. There are many things that they could improve from each application and each portal.
JL
Supervisor, Infraestructura Information Technology at Refineria Dominicana de Petroleo
Customer support excels with timely responses and valuable assistance
Some of the best features with Sophos Phish Threat are good, but it has some limits. For instance, if you send an attachment to target the user with a macro, it doesn't work very well because by default Outlook disables opening macro files. Word macro files open in read-only mode. It has some false positives, such as when the user opened the file. We had good experience, and based on our three years of use, the users responded well. The videos are animated, and users prefer them, similar to our other applications for training in other areas. The integration with Sophos Central benefits us for the management of the phishing campaign by being very user-friendly. We used the customizable phishing emails with Sophos Phish Threat. We customized the template and modified it so we can phish our users. They are very customizable. The pricing and licensing for Sophos Phish Threat is good compared to other products.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Construction Company
11%
University
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise54
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Proofpoint Email Protection?
This is not something that I deal with regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing.
What needs improvement with Proofpoint Email Protection?
For a beginner level, someone who is very new to email security might find it difficult to manage as an admin. Navigation can be concerning because Proofpoint Email Protection has different console...
What is your primary use case for Proofpoint Email Protection?
Proofpoint Email Protection serves as our email security solution. The entire SOC team uses Proofpoint Email Protection. The granularity in admin access is different, so each team has their own acc...
What needs improvement with Sophos Phish Threat?
Sophos Phish Threat is a good product, but it has some limitations. We prefer Spanish language content, and the video selection has limitations. The catalog is very small compared with products suc...
What is your primary use case for Sophos Phish Threat?
I had experience with other products before KnowBe4, specifically we had Sophos Phish Threat for three years, but the catalog of training, video, and simulated phishing has some limits. Last Februa...
What advice do you have for others considering Sophos Phish Threat?
I rate Sophos Phish Threat eight out of ten due to some limitations, specifically the limited training catalog and the need for more trainings in local languages, particularly Spanish. A bigger cou...
 

Also Known As

Proofpoint Enterprise Protection, Proofpoint Digital Protection
Phish Threat
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blocket, University of Waterloo, Lincoln Memorial University, WellSpan Health, U-Haul, Carestream Health, Westinghouse
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Proofpoint, Mimecast and others in Secure Email Gateway (SEG). Updated: May 2026.
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