Smarsh

Pros

Email hosting and archiving is easy to set up and utilize. Searching for archived emails works well through their internal sites

Cons

Customer service is difficult to work with via email. Also, searching for an email via the main hosting site is difficult and inaccurate at times.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Smarsh

Pros

I like that data archiving is easy as well as retrieval
It comes with best enterprise search features
It comes with social media monitoring and cyber protection

Cons

With Smarsh, everything has just worked and no dislikes yet.

Pros

It does what it says. It archive platforms that you need archived.

Their service department is prompt in providing technical assistance although we have needed little.

Cons

Contracts and Renewals: They have done away with monthly renewals. You are locked into a year long agreement. You must renew 2months prior. So 3months. And their invoices don't give you any clue as to what you are paying for. Between the adjustments and impossible to follow invoices. They have designed their billing system to be as confusing as possible trapping you into a contract that is 3x the cost of the competition. And that isn't an exaggeration. 3x compared to other platforms.

Service: Their service team for negotiations over-promises and never delivers. Stringing things out until you are forced to renew.

Pricing: You pay per platform. Which has a zero correlation to your invoice. So if you wanted to archive 3 different platforms for 30 users. Instead of having clear delineation, it's a single line item that is 90 users. And typically this number is 10% bigger than it should be. Which is impossible to figure out why. You end up having artificially inflated pricing just by headcount alone.

Platform: The management interface has two separate locations for management. Making it completely confusing to request support. If you aren't an admin in one location. Good luck they won't help you. You have to be a support admin in another place. It makes zero sense and is quite cumbersome to deal with.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Smarsh

Reasons for Switching to Smarsh

Cons

We signed up for Smarsh email archiving services for a small price per month per user. This is considered expensive, but we wanted a good service. We had about 26 users, so Smarsh should have been charging us monthly. It started fine and we were charged this amount, but slowly, after the first few months, Smarsh started charging for other services. These services were NOT agreed to at any time and they were not in our contract. The monthly amount ballooned to nearly triple the original price. Note that we never requested any change, any additional services. Smarsh on their own, and despite the contract started charging more. At the original monthly rate, Smarsh was already one of the most expensive options for archiving, but at three times the original rate per month, it was like charging an incredible amount for an ice cream cone. We terminated our agreement and started with another provider.

Smarsh at that time still had our archived emails. They were only willing to give them to us for a ransom payment. There was nothing in our contract about a fee to receive our own emails back once our relationship with Smarsh ended. We could have downloaded those emails from them via FTP at no cost to them (which is the way most firms in this space do it). Even mailing them to us on an external drive would have cost no more than a few hundred $.

Other problems as well, but I cannot discourage you enough from using Smarsh. Avoid at all costs unless you want to overpay for poor service, support, and having your content held at ransom.

Pros

The archiving function appears to work reliably. The user interface is intuitive and well-designed.

Cons

Searching, sorting, and exporting email from the archive is extremely unreliable, glitchy, and buggy.