How much does Abnormal cost compared to Material?

Abnormal AI prices its email security per mailbox, typically through custom quotes, and additional protection is sold as separate products. Material bundles email, file, and account coverage at a cost comparable to email-only tools, with AI included at every tier. The practical comparison is how much of the cloud workspace each price actually protects.

WHICH SOLUTION WORKS FOR YOU?

Material Security  vs. Abnormal AI

Material is an alternative to Abnormal AI, formerly Abnormal Security, for teams that want to prevent attacks and harden their posture across the email, files, connected apps, and identities that live in the cloud workspace. Abnormal leans on black box automation that can reduce what you see and change. Material pairs automation with clear evidence and precise remediation actions you can customize across the cloud workspace.

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Material Security is best for cloud-first organizations that want protection across email, files, and accounts in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Material is designed for companies that need:

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-Integrated visibility into threats across the cloud workspace in addition to email security
-Resilient identity controls, like automatically investigating and remediating OAuth grants in Google Workspace
-Customizability for integrations, detections, and remediations

Abnormal AI is best for organizations that want focused protection against phishing and social engineering attacks in cloud email environments. Abnormal is designed for companies that want:

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-Laser-focus on blocking phish from the inbox
-An out-of-the-box solution with minimal configuration options
-To handle email as a dedicated function

Differentiators Between Material Security & Abnormal AI

01.

Visibility and Control That Security Teams Deserve

Material takes a comprehensive approach to cloud workspace security, combining top-tier email security with data and account protections to deliver detection and response across the entire workspace, not just the inbox. Connecting by API to Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, teams get the evidence they need to investigate a threat end-to-end:

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- Integrated visibility across email, files, connected apps, and accounts
- Rich audit logs
- Detailed message identifiers
- In-depth forensic data

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Abnormal AI focuses on inbound phishing protection, with a design that reduces complexity for teams that want automated results without deeper investigation. With Abnormal, you can expect:

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- Fully managed intelligence
- Audit logs with higher-level activity
- Updates to its behavioral AI models through a ticketed request

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As an email security platform that exposes its signal, Material lets teams verify and tune detection decisions rather than accept them, which matters when a missed call is a real attack and a wrong call is a false positive that buries the team.

02.

A Platform You Can Build on, Not Around

Material is built to use out of the box and customize over time. It is designed to fit into your security operations, including account takeover containment:

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- Connect to AI tools with Material's MCP
- Create event subscriptions to integrate with commonly used systems
- Use read and write APIs to adapt the platform to your workflows
- Tune detections to keep pace with emerging threats and sophisticated attacks as attacker behavior shifts
Abnormal AI provides read-only APIs that let customers extract data for reporting and analysis. Because Abnormal emphasizes phishing detection as its core strength, it does not prioritize the same custom interconnectivity to other systems

03.

More Coverage at a Fraction of the Cost

Material is built to defend against the full lifecycle of modern email threats, at a cost comparable to Abnormal's email-only security. Alongside sophisticated anti-phishing, the platform addresses a broader set of risks:

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- Identifies and automatically remediates account takeovers
- Classifies and secures sensitive files
- Hardens identities to protect accounts and connected apps

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This is threat detection and response across the workspace, not inbound filtering and alerts. Abnormal AI focuses primarily on phishing detection, with strong protection in that domain and remediation that commonly involves deletion or routing to spam. For buyers comparing pricing, the real question is how much of the workspace each tool actually covers.

Features

API-Based Implementation

Detect Malicious Email

ATO Alerts

ATO Resiliency Features

Sensitive Data Classification: Email

Sensitive Data Classification: Files

Group Similar Cases for Easy Investigation

Automatic OAuth grant management

Historical Mailbox Analysis

Agentic Google Drive management

Advanced Search and Discovery

Automated Remediations: Email

Automated Remediations: Accounts and Files

Why do security teams choose Material Security?

It’s simple: it provides protection beyond just email at a better value.

Email Security

Material runs on auto-pilot to remediate sophisticated email attacks that bypass traditional controls—providing a balance of flexibility and control without disrupting operations.

Data Security

Understand where sensitive data exists, if it is exposed, and reduce the risk. Material detects sensitive content in files and automatically remediates excessive permissions and inappropriate sharing.

Identity Security

Detect account takeovers, contain their impact, manage OAuth grants, and proactively harden your accounts. Material prevents attackers from establishing their presence, moving laterally, and exfiltrating sensitive data.

The most innovative organizations trust Material

Yes. Material Security is an alternative to Abnormal AI, formerly Abnormal Security, for teams that want transparent detection signal, remediation they control, and coverage that extends past email into files and accounts. Both connect by API to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, but Material exposes its evidence for investigation and adds account takeover containment and data protection rather than focusing on inbound phishing alone.

The main Abnormal Security competitors are Material Security, Proofpoint, and Mimecast, along with the native controls in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Material competes most directly for cloud-first teams that want one platform across email, files, and accounts. Proofpoint and Mimecast are gateway-oriented options often chosen by large enterprises with DMARC requirements.

Material is built specifically for Google Workspace and protects email, Google Drive files, and accounts through the Google API. Abnormal supports Google Workspace but centers on inbound email detection and does not classify or remediate sensitive files in Drive. For Google-first teams, Material covers more of the workspace and can contain account takeovers rather than only alerting on them.

Abnormal AI detects account takeover signals and surfaces alerts for compromised accounts. Material detects the same signals and goes further by containing the account, applying message-level access controls to sensitive data and remediating the forwarding rules, delegated access, and, in Google Workspace, the OAuth grants attackers use to keep access. The difference is alerting versus containment.

Both use AI to detect threats, but they expose it differently. Abnormal's behavioral AI builds a baseline of normal communication and flags anomalies, with detection managed as a largely closed system. Material applies AI detection across email, files, and accounts and keeps it tunable and transparent, so teams can see why a threat was flagged, adjust detections, and correlate behavioral anomalies in email with file and account activity as one attack sequence.

Proofpoint and Abnormal represent two approaches to email security, a traditional secure email gateway and an API-based behavioral platform. Material is API-based like Abnormal but extends coverage to files and accounts and contains compromised accounts, and it avoids the MX record changes a gateway like Proofpoint requires. See Material vs. Proofpoint for that comparison.

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Material Security user interface of identity security issues

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Material Security  vs. Abnormal AI

Differentiators Between Material Security & Abnormal AI