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

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

I could not urge you to stay as far away as you can from this platform. What others say is true. They will hold your data hostage if you try to leave. They've designed their platform to keep you trapped in contract hell and will also personally ensure to delay contract negotiations until access is shut off and you are forced to pay the renewal. Overall their solution is a borderline scam. If they returned to monthly contracts updated to clear billing practices and updated their platform to remove the separate portals. It would be night and day.

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.

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.

Learning to never use them in any capacity again. Their product is so bad, I want to ensure that others learn from our experience.

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.

My organization (a governmental entity) purchased Smarsh to help manager our email archive and to allow us to easily search and compile email for public records requests and litigation. Using Smarsh has been an exercise in constant frustration. You will get a slick sales presentation, but be prepared for almost constant error messages when trying to complete the simplest tasks, such as searching for email, moving email into a "case", and exporting. Not just once and awhile... maybe 25% of the time on a good day, 90% of the time on a bad day. And Smarsh has a lot of bad days. Customer service is a joke. A nice person answers and tells you to try again later. But I have not found a time of day (and I've tried early morning and late at night) when the Smarsh works noticeably better than at other times. Smarsh has at least a half dozen different error screens and popups, which is very telling. You will become familiar with them all.

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

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