The Best Smarsh Alternatives for Collaboration Compliance and Discovery
Smarsh provides cloud-based archiving and compliance solutions for collaboration tools, social media, websites, and email. Businesses choose Smarsh for its extensive information archiving capabilities, wide range of integrations, and flexible deployment options, including cloud-based, on-prem, and hybrid.
Using Smarsh, businesses can securely archive their data for compliance and retain a searchable record of company communications across multiple channels and data types. However, Smarsh might not be the best solution for every organization seeking compliant archiving and discovery for collaboration data. This post explores capabilities, shortcoming, and alternatives so you can make an informed choice.
Contents
- How Smarsh Falls Short as a Compliance and Discovery Solution
- Smarsh Alternatives for Compliance and Discovery
How Smarsh Falls Short as a Compliance and Discovery Solution
While users appreciate the ability to reliably archive data from multiple sources and implement ethical walls to reduce cross-department visibility, Smarsh does have some limitations and challenges where it may be outperformed by competitors in the marketplace. For example, Smarsh doesn’t enable legal holds and its search capability is less granular than other products, which may lead to excessive amounts of false positive results.
As a vendor, Smarsh focuses primarily on serving the finance industry, and customers in other industries may find it lacks some features and controls that matter most to them. Additionally, Smarsh’s monitoring feature is keyword-based, potentially making it easier for malicious actors to circumvent.
Other shortfalls of Smarsh include:
- Lack of always-on collection for legal
- Product complexity can create a steep learning curve
- No native redaction for PDF exports
- Tech support is over-reliant on instructional videos
Finally, Smarsh users may find additional fees are applicable for various aspects of the product, including storing, crawling, exporting, and restoring their data, leading to unexpected costs.
“Smarsh has been one disappointment after another and one headache after another…if you want it to work, you gotta pay extra.”
“The administration, account servicing, and billing is among the worst of any organization we deal with…they quoted us a time of week and exorbitant costs to re-instate the service and correct the error that they had made.”
"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.”
Smarsh Competitors for Compliance and Discovery
Smarsh Alternative: Aware
Aware’s AI platform provides businesses with unified compliance and federated search for collaboration tools, with secure archiving, legal holds, and bidirectional data retention. Aware ingests and analyzes a complete record data from tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Viva Engage (Yammer), Zoom, Cisco Webex and more—including deletions and modifications—providing real-time compliance monitoring and moderation across the collaboration stack.
Using Aware, compliance teams can establish granular retention policies to preserve or purge content according to regulatory requirements or business need, while legal officers can perform fast, effective eDiscovery from a search-ready archive that enables search queries and results filtering by multiple parameters to reduce false positives.
Aware’s industry-leading NLP and proprietary AI/ML models connect seamlessly to existing tools and workflows with minimal IT lift and zero impact on end user experience. Governance is managed from an intuitive centralized platform backed by enterprise-grade security and role-based access controls, ensuring your collaboration data remains secure while being immediately accessible for forensic search and investigations.
Using Aware, companies can:
- Consolidate compliance, discovery, and monitoring across collaboration
- Surface and mitigate data risks and noncompliance in real time
- Understand the context surrounding triggers and alerts
Learn More
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Detect regulated and sensitive data in real time with fewer false positives than the leading competitors.
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Improve compliance posture, minimize regulatory exposure and protect your company with AI-powered compliance capabilities.
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Smarsh Alternative: Global Relay Archive
Like Smarsh, Global Relay Archive captures and archives company data from multiple sources, including email, messaging, social media, and voice. Global Relay Archive enables businesses to secure their data in a central repository that supports compliance with regulations across a variety of industries, including SEC Rule 17a-4, FINRA Rule 4511(c), and HIPAA.
While Global Relay Archive offers some search functionality, backed by AI-assisted workflows, it remains primarily an archiving solution and its core capabilities for search and discovery may not be as robust as those offered by some competitors. It also lacks the ability to proactively monitor and mitigate data risk incidents, unlike similar products on the market.
Additionally, reviewers have noted that canceling the service can be “a nightmare,” with hidden costs to download data that “effectively [hold] your data hostage.”
Smarsh Alternative: Onna
Onna is a Reveal-owned data management platform that consolidates data from multiple sources for faster federated search and discovery. Using Onna, companies can simplify compliance and discovery in large, complex data sets. However, unlike Smarsh and some other competitors, Onna does not archive data in real time. This can be problematic for legal and compliance teams seeking a continuous record of all communications, as it creates the potential for spoliation and noncompliance.
While Onna supports unified search and discovery across collaboration tools, it does not offer data loss prevention controls or bidirectional retention, limiting its capabilities for compliance monitoring or enforcement. Reviewers also note that Onna has “data usage constraints” and syncing products with the platform can be “painfully long.”
Smarsh Alternative: Pagefreezer
Pagefreezer provides archiving and monitoring for various data sources, including websites, social media, and collaboration tools. The Pagefreezer archive makes data accessible for a range of use cases, including compliance monitoring and legal discovery.
Like Smarsh and similar products, Pagefreezer captures data in real time and enables litigation holds and defensible exports, making it a more robust eDiscovery solution compared with some competitors. However, similar to Onna, reviewers note that searches performed on Pagefreezer data “can be time-consuming” and will “sometimes time out.”
Ultimately, Pagefreezer’s continuous archiving capabilities are valuable for organizations that require backups from a wide range of sources, but its ability to search and analyze data may be slower and less robust than other archiving and discovery solutions.
Smarsh Alternative: Theta Lake
Theta Lake is a security and compliance solution for collaboration platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom. It archives content in audio, video, and chat communications and analyzes messages for noncompliant behaviors. Theta Lake’s audio/video analytic capabilities may put it ahead of Smarsh in consideration for organizations that are multimedia-dominant, however its lack of real-time ingestion and lack of NLP context, sentiment, and toxicity analysis for written messages may reduce Theta Lake’s effectiveness in securing chat data.
Batch archiving also creates compliance and security gaps that businesses should consider when evaluating Theta Lake. Reviewers also note that contract and service costs can be unclear, while the standard archiving policy may not include all the functionality a business requires, necessitating upgrades that increase the total cost of ownership.
Final thoughts
When considering Smarsh alternatives for collaboration compliance and discovery, it’s important to ask several key questions:
- Does the solution archive a complete record of data, or are there gaps in the record?
- Can it perform real-time monitoring and moderation to mitigate risks?
- What methodology is used to analyze data (regex/keyword/NLP) and how does it reduce false positives and alert fatigue?
- Does the product integrate with existing tools and workflows, or will it require additional lift?
- Are its pricing structure and product features clear and transparent, or are there additional fees for rule creation and data storage or extraction?
By considering each compliance and discovery platform in relation to your specific needs and being proactive about understanding how the different solutions ingest, secure, and make data accessible for investigations and analysis, compliance, legal, and security teams can make an informed decision about the right software to meet their needs.
