IRONSCALES vs Abnormal Security vs Sublime Security: The New Generation of Email Security Compared

# IRONSCALES vs Abnormal Security vs Sublime Security: The New Generation of Email Security Compared

Legacy secure email gateways built around static rules and signature matching have given way to a new generation of API-based, AI-driven platforms. IRONSCALES, Abnormal Security, and Sublime Security represent three distinct philosophies within that new generation. Here is how they actually differ.

IRONSCALES: collaborative intelligence and the fastest remediation

IRONSCALES holds the highest Gartner Peer Insights rating in email security with a rare 100 percent willingness to recommend score. The defining capability is automated remediation: once one employee reports a phishing email, it is removed from every affected mailbox simultaneously, and detection improves across the entire customer base within minutes as threat intelligence is shared collaboratively.

This is the right platform when speed of remediation and proven customer satisfaction at scale matter most.

Abnormal Security: behavioural baselines for business email compromise

Abnormal built its reputation specifically on business email compromise and executive impersonation, using behavioural baselines of normal communication patterns to catch attacks that bypass signature-based detection entirely. Organisations processing high-value transactions, particularly in financial services, consistently report the strongest results here.

Sublime Security: transparent, editable detection logic

Sublime takes the most architecturally different approach of the three, exposing fully editable detection logic that security engineers can inspect and tune directly rather than trusting an opaque vendor model. Detection adapts as fast as a security team can write a rule, which matters for organisations facing attack patterns specific to their industry or environment that a global model has not yet learned.

This requires genuine security engineering investment to extract full value, and is the right fit specifically for teams with that capability who have grown frustrated with black-box detection they cannot influence.

How to choose

If remediation speed and proven satisfaction at scale is the priority, IRONSCALES. If BEC and executive impersonation is the specific threat driving the evaluation, Abnormal Security. If your security team wants to own and tune detection logic directly, Sublime Security.

Our recommendation

Most organisations without a dedicated security engineering function should evaluate IRONSCALES or Abnormal Security first, since both deliver strong results without requiring ongoing rule-tuning investment. Organisations with genuine security engineering capacity who have felt limited by opaque detection should add Sublime Security to their evaluation.

Last reviewed: August 2026.