Tessian alternative for teams without a security department

Two Products, One Moment

Tessian and Presend both live in the same two seconds: after you decide to send and before the message is gone. That is where the similarity ends, and it is worth being precise about the difference, because the two products answer different questions.

Tessian asks: is this going to the wrong person? It builds a model of who you normally email about what, and flags an outbound message that breaks the pattern — a spreadsheet to a personal address, a client's name in a message to a different client. It is very good at this, it is why Proofpoint bought the company, and Presend does not do it.

Presend asks: is there something in this message that should not leave? A credential, a card number, a phrase your company has banned, an attachment you said you attached and did not, a draft that reads like a chatbot wrote it. It checks the content in front of you, on every surface you write on, and raises a confirmation when a finding is classed as risk.

What Presend Does Not Do

There are three things a Tessian buyer might expect that Presend will not give them.

Behavioural misdirection detection. Presend does not learn your recipient graph. It surfaces every external recipient before you send, listed by address, and you can write a rule like "warn me when a message mentions a customer's contract value and any recipient is outside our domain." That is a rule you control, not an anomaly model, and it catches a different set of mistakes.

Mis-attached files. Presend checks that a message which says "attached" has an attachment. It does not open the attachment and decide it is the wrong one.

Central quarantine. Presend gates the sender. It does not hold messages in a queue for an administrator to release. Team plans give you shared rules and a dashboard of what fired, not a message hold.

If any of those three is the reason you are shopping, Presend is not your alternative.

What You Get Instead

A person can install it. There is no mail-flow integration and no security team in the loop. The extension goes into Chrome, and the check runs from the first message.

It runs everywhere you write. Tessian sees corporate email. The same API key leaks just as readily into a Slack thread, a LinkedIn message, a Zendesk reply, or a Notion comment, and Presend checks all of them — every textarea and contenteditable on the web, found structurally rather than by a per-site list.

It looks at the writing. Two engines run on every draft. A deterministic slop detector counts model tells and returns clean, traces or slop. A local voice check compares the draft against your own sent messages and returns a verdict — sounds like you, drifts, or not enough of your writing yet — with the drifting sentences underlined. A message can be correctly addressed and still cost you a relationship.

Your rules, in plain English. The built-in checks cover what is universal. Everything specific to your job — unreleased product names, delivery promises without a date, competitor names in outbound — you write yourself, with one severity each. On Team those rules are shared across the org and can call a webhook when a check needs data Presend does not have.

Privacy, Stated Carefully

Presend does not store your message bodies. Drafts are scored and what is retained is a one-way hash, enough to count and deduplicate and not enough to reconstruct what you wrote. The voice profile is computed in the browser and never leaves the device. Pro users can bring their own API key so model calls bill to their own provider.

Tessian, as part of an email security platform, necessarily processes and retains mail-flow data under the enterprise agreement. That is not a criticism; it is the shape of the product.

Pricing

Tessian pricing is by quote and is not published. Presend is free for twenty-five AI checks a day with local rule checks unlimited, three dollars a month for Pro, and twenty-nine dollars per user per month for Team. A ten-person team on Pro is $360 a year, which is under most enterprise tools' minimum seat count.