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Barracuda Email Protection vs Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Barracuda Email Protection
Ranking in Email Security
12th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Email Archiving (2nd), Office 365 Protection (5th)
Fortra's Clearswift Secure ...
Ranking in Email Security
41st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
0
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 3.0%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway is 1.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Barracuda Email Protection3.0%
Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway1.0%
Other96.0%
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

LeeMiles - PeerSpot reviewer
Very good threat protection, spam filtering, and cloud backups
Considering it integrates with Azure, I would like to be able to effectively set up policies where people are by default included in certain settings. For instance, for email quarantine, I can't set up a global setting. Users must go through an induction session where I guide them in configuring quarantine alerts rather than having default settings based on group membership. This seems like an oversight since they already use Active Directory details. They should assign policies based on group membership, which configures these settings by default.
PC
Stable, but malware needs improvement and customer support is poor
They need to improve the malware in the product. I am not satisfied with Clearswift because of the lack of customer support. The support is poor, the supplier takes a lot of time and it's expensive. We have some issues here when I contact the supplier, it takes a lot of time for them to get back to us but there's no solution. I am now looking at Symantec as a possible alternative.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"When we got the service, it included the email archiver with unlimited storage."
"The archiving and search features are very good."
"The most valuable features are security and ease of use."
"The most valuable aspect includes attempts to spoof or compromise domains from external sources."
"We now have a secondary backup of Office 365 that's much easier to retrieve compared to Microsoft. If someone deletes something in Office 365, we can get it back within Office 365, but it's difficult. Barracuda is much easier. There is a lot less management needed using Barracuda. The management becomes much easier for Office 365 and it's no longer on-prem, so there are fewer hours managing on-prem devices, servers, and things of that nature. We don't have network appliances anymore for the backup of our information."
"The solution's most valuable feature is impersonation detection."
"The most valuable features of Barracuda Essentials are it's a trusted name and is rated very high on review sites. It blocks high percentages of spam and junk email and it's in the cloud. They have hardware appliances, but this is in the cloud. The solution is very effective at blocking malware and blocking spam and this is what we are looking for. There's not a whole lot of complexity, you want a solution that is very good at blocking out all of the unwanted emails."
"The most valuable features of Barracuda Email Protection are flexibility and customization."
"A stable solution."
"Ability to create your own content-filtering policies with relative ease."
 

Cons

"The policies are set up in Barracuda by default; we don't have any control over them."
"The solution's graphical user interface (GUI) could be improved visually."
"Two to three months back, we got fraudulent emails in which someone in the organization was being blamed."
"I would like to see better integration with other products."
"I would like to see some additional functionality in terms of employee monitoring, as part of a work-from-home security solution."
"Barracuda Email Protection needs better reporting and more robust integration with security awareness training platforms and third-party solutions."
"The platform's pricing needs improvement."
"The technology works on a supervised engine, but it would be better if it ran on an unsupervised engine."
"FTP server and TRUST Manager functionality."
"Malware needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay annually. They never charged us for anything else. And they were quite a bit under that $20,000 mark. It was $19,074. And they've been pretty good about not skyrocketing the price or anything like that. It has gone up. It's gone up to $24,000 in 2020."
"Price-wise, this product is middle-of-the-road."
"The price is similar to that of Microsoft 365."
"The price of Barracuda Essentials is better than some of the competing products."
"The solution's pricing is moderate, where it is neither cheap nor expensive."
"Barracuda licensing model is good."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
"The product is expensive."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise3
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Barracuda Email Protection?
Barracuda Email Protection is easy to deploy and maintain. It doesn't require a specialized resource to manage this tool.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Email Protection?
Their list price is too high, but in India, the selling price is affordable at around $10 per user per year. Despite a list price possibly around $40 per user, their market price allows customers t...
What needs improvement with Barracuda Email Protection?
Considering it integrates with Azure, I would like to be able to effectively set up policies where people are by default included in certain settings. For instance, for email quarantine, I can't se...
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Also Known As

Barracuda Essentials
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ACT Government, Acumen Group, AGIP, Delta Dental Plans Association, Desai/Nasr Consulting Engineers, Inc., Equinox Information Systems
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Email Protection vs. Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
871,469 professionals have used our research since 2012.