The rules of email security are being rewritten in real time. Generative AI has blurred the line between human and machine-crafted attacks, and collaboration tools have become the new inbox. Against this backdrop, the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security offers the Gartner perspective on how vendors are adapting to a new era of AI-driven threats and shifting enterprise needs.

Among the 14 vendors evaluated in the 2025 quadrant, Abnormal AI was named a Leader for the second consecutive year, placed furthest on the Completeness of Vision axis.

Each year’s Magic Quadrant acts as a snapshot of a market in motion, and 2025 is no exception. Generative AI has lowered the barrier to deploying tailored, automated threats, while the shift to cloud-based collaboration tools has expanded the attack surface beyond email itself. Security teams are balancing these pressures against talent shortages and the demand for operational efficiency. In our opinion, this year’s quadrant underscores a reality most CISOs and practitioners feel: the pace of change is outrunning manual defense.

In our opinion, the Gartner analysis offers more than just a chart; it’s a reference point for strategy. Security and IT leaders often consult the Magic Quadrant to benchmark the market landscape, inform their strategic planning, and understand how vendors are positioned in a particular category. We believe the axes themselves speak to today’s priorities: Ability to Execute reflects trust and operational reliability, while Completeness of Vision analyzes how well a vendor anticipates where the market is heading.

In our opinion, what’s clear from this year’s analysis is that AI is no longer just a feature in email security—it’s the engine powering detection, response, and user education. Many vendors across the quadrant are investing in automation designed to triage alerts, remediate incidents, and even train employees without constant human oversight. The goal is to turn security from a series of manual processes into a system that learns and acts in real time.

At the same time, AI is empowering attackers. Generative models create and deploy convincing phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks in seconds. We believe this duality—with AI serving as both weapon and shield—continues to reshape the email security landscape and makes the independent analysis of vendors by Gartner particularly valuable this year.

“Leaders are recognized for strong market adoption, financial stability, and established integrations with major collaboration platforms. They may offer comprehensive or targeted solutions that blend traditional gateway functions with modern API-driven protection, and consistently achieve high feature attachment rates for add-ons. They often possess high-volume, established global customer bases across various enterprise sizes.”
— 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security

Abnormal was purpose-built with AI to understand human behavior and protect people from modern email threats. Behavioral AI sits at the foundation of the platform—analyzing identity, context, and relationships across every message to detect anomalies and comprehensively prevent attacks. Deployed through a one-click API integration that requires no mail routing or MX record changes, Abnormal makes each stage of email defense more intelligent and more autonomous, from inbound attack remediation to user-reported phishing triage and training.

Over the past year, we’ve taken many steps to strengthen our Abnormal innovation:

• Reclaimed our original company name, Abnormal AI, signaling our expansion into a broader AI-native security platform.

• Released AI Phishing Coach and AI Data Analyst, autonomous agents that extend AI-driven defense beyond inbound email.

• Expanded Security Posture Management for Microsoft 365, helping organizations identify and remediate risky misconfigurations.

• Achieved FedRAMP Moderate Authorization and ISO/IEC 42001 certification for responsible AI governance.

• Earned spots on the Forbes Cloud 100 (top 20) and CNBC Disruptor 50, and expanded operations into Germany, Japan, and France.

We believe our continued placement as a Leader in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security highlights the growing importance of increasingly intelligent defenses in email security and reinforces our mission to protect humans with behavioral AI.

In our opinion, the real value of 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security lies in perspective. The report offers security practitioners and leaders an independent way to see how vendors are evolving to meet new threats, and where real innovation can be found. We encourage every organization to read the report not just to evaluate vendors, but to gain insight into how the market is evolving through advancements in automation, behavioral understanding, and AI governance that are helping define the next generation of email security.

“The high volume of sophisticated, email-enabled social engineering attacks, combined with the difficulty in consistently quantifying true detection efficacy across the market, justifies organizations utilizing multiple vendors for comprehensive protection.”
— 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security

As machine learning reshapes attack and defense, we see a future where security systems operate with both human intuition and machine speed, understanding context, making decisions, and acting with greater autonomy. The 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security reflects an exciting and challenging moment of transition for the industry. Abnormal is honored to be part of it.

Explore the full market analysis and vendor landscape featured in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security.

Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security, Max Taggett, Nikul Patel, December 1, 2025.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Abnormal AI.

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