Mimecast or Abnormal?

Mimecast and Abnormal? Mimecast or Abnormal? Abnormal and 365?

As a company with experience in both of these products, we consider ourselves very savvy regarding the capabilities of each platform.

The biggest difference between the two is that Mimecast is a soup-to-nuts security gateway for email, whereas Abnormal is more of an add-on to Office 365. Abnormal performs a limited set of security checks—but what it does, it does well. Specifically, it excels at detecting business email compromise (BEC) attacks. It also attempts to address spam and impersonation attacks, where it has moderate success but does not outperform Mimecast.

Abnormal offers a much fancier interface for reviewing certain email attacks. However, in our experience, it’s more of an “ooh, shiny!” feature than an actual boost to productivity or a meaningful improvement to your email security posture.

The biggest weakness of Mimecast is that it requires knowledge and effort to configure properly. If you’re unfamiliar with how to optimize its settings and policies, you won’t be able to bring its BEC protections up to the level of Abnormal’s out-of-the-box setup.

If you already have an optimized Mimecast configuration along with the Advanced BEC product, you likely won’t see much benefit from adding Abnormal.

With Abnormal, you’ll still need another solution because it doesn’t provide full coverage. Many companies keep Mimecast in place and add Abnormal, or they choose to purchase Microsoft Defender and pair it with Abnormal as a way to move away from Mimecast.

Before purchasing Abnormal, we highly recommend contacting us to discuss your options for leveraging what you already have. We’ve implemented best practices for customers using Mimecast so effectively that in many cases, it has completely eliminated concerns or interest in exploring other platforms.