As we look ahead to the new year, we’re also reflecting on what we’ve heard consistently from our customers and the market. Email remains the leading vector for cyberattacks, and the market is shifting quickly as social engineering threats accelerate, and agentic adoption expands both the attack surface and the attacker's toolkit. In our opinion, the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Security reflects these changes. We believe it offers a clear view of how vendors are adapting, where the market is heading, and what buyers should weigh as they evaluate solutions.
Reflecting on this feedback and our reading of the report, we feel this year’s report underscores a market defined by rapid innovation and rising expectations for usability and operational efficiency. From our perspective, Proofpoint leads the way in both areas. Once again, Proofpoint is recognized as a Leader, highest in Ability to Execute and recognized for Completeness of Vision. Proofpoint also received the highest ranking for Integrated Cloud Email Security and Outbound Email Security in the Gartner Critical Capabilities report. In our opinion, these results reinforce Proofpoint’s position as the standard for enterprise-grade email security and operational excellence.
Below is an overview of key insights from Gartner, followed by our summary of our placement in this year’s report.
Key trends and themes identified in the 2025 Magic Quadrant & Critical Capabilities
Email security is advancing to counter social engineering
Vendors continue to improve detection engines with more accurate language models, expanded language support, and new signals generated from sources such as computer vision and dynamic webpage analysis.
At Proofpoint, we’ve developed Nexus AI, which provides language models and relationship graphs to power advanced social engineering detection, providing customers with 99.999% detection efficacy.
Prioritizing integration into broader workspace security
In Gartner Critical Capabilities for Email Security, they highlight out that “This integration improves threat correlation, detection and response, enhancing the overall security posture across the enterprise.” We agree.
Proofpoint customers can now pair expanding agentic integrations across Microsoft Copilot and CrowdStrike Charlotte. These unique integrations support accelerated response times and broader risk reduction.
Growth in collaboration security and misdirected email protection
The report highlights “most vendors now offer some level of security for collaboration applications, with many releasing or extending the capability within the last year, bringing email protections to file shares, communications tools and SaaS applications such as Dropbox, Salesforce, SharePoint, Slack, and Teams.”
With attackers conducting multi-channel attacks, broad coverage of newly abused channels is critical. Unlike others, Proofpoint offers a browser-based, vs. application-based approach for coverage anywhere a user interacts.
In the case of misdirected email, architecture is similarly important. Proofpoint leverages Microsoft’s Adaptive Cards as a more intuitive, in-line experience instead of ‘bounce back emails’ users are prone to miss.
Proofpoint’s 2025 position
Proofpoint’s Core Email Protection API solution provides a simpler integration path without compromising enterprise grade protection. Last week, we were thrilled to announce the completion of our acquisition of Hornetsecurity to provide small businesses with email protection powered by Proofpoint’s solutions.
Prepared for the future of email and collaboration threats
As human-to-agent, and agent-to-agent collaborations become more common, organizations face a new wave of multi-channel and multi-stage threats. Securing AI-driven collaboration is paramount to the future of security across communications channels, and Proofpoint is at the forefront of securing the agentic workspace.
While attackers find new ways to compromise organizations like, malicious email prompt injection and agent impersonation, Proofpoint’s unparalleled threat dataset and breakthrough AI models provide market leading precision, strong data protection and broad visibility across communication channels.
We’re proud to be recognized again as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Security, and even more proud to help protect the people and information that matter most.
Get your copy of the report
Be sure to download your complimentary copy of the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Security, which is available here.
