Barracuda Email Protection vs Fortinet FortiMail comparison

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12,659 views|10,155 comparisons
97% willing to recommend
Barracuda Networks Logo
1,444 views|1,173 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
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6,664 views|4,388 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Barracuda Email Protection and Fortinet FortiMail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Email Security solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda Email Protection vs. Fortinet FortiMail Report (Updated: March 2024).
769,479 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"I would say that 90% of the spam and phishing attack emails get blocked right off the bat.""The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender.""The solution is very easy to use. All you have to do is to assign the license to the end-user and it's done. The customer will only have the feature activated, and the solution will monitor the emails to determine if they are a threat or not.""It gives us visibility into threats and, for endpoints, it helps us to prioritize threats. We used to have a lack of visibility, but now our time to detect and respond has decreased.""The initial setup is straightforward. You just add the license, click it, and then you can set up the rules. It is quite simple.""Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable feature is its performance.""The most valuable feature is protection against malicious links, fishing, and impersonation. You can train people to be aware of these threats, but they're not always careful. When they're using their phones between meetings, they click on a link, and it's game over.""The benefit that stands out to me is the ability for multiple individuals to collaborate simultaneously within the same document. Additionally, there is the option to save the document directly in the integrated OneDrive or SharePoint."

More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pros →

"The best feature of Barracuda Email Protection is that it provides protection for Microsoft 365.""The solution is straightforward to set up.""The most valuable features of Barracuda Email Protection are flexibility and customization.""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.""Barracuda email protection is stable. I would give it a nine because of its strong cybersecurity features.""The product is easy to deploy and maintain.""The most valuable features are security and ease of use."

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"Fortinet FortiMail is easy to use and the detection rate is very good. You can customize content filters and profiles are done easily. Additionally, there is a sandbox integration feature that is good.""FortiMail possesses notable strengths, and one key feature is its store-and-forward concept.""Troubleshooting is very simple because you can see where the email was not delivered and why it would be considered as spam.""Fortinet FortiMail is a complete product addressing mail security concerns. It helps to know spam subscriptions and create restriction policies.""The spam filtering is great.""The most valuable feature of this solution is the spam filter.""The most valuable features of Fortinet FortiMail are its virus outbreak prevention and FortiSandbox integration.""The anti-spam features are valuable."

More Fortinet FortiMail Pros →

Cons
"The custom alerts have to improve a lot.""Microsoft Defender for Office 365 must improve the overall management style, including the GUI. It also needs to change the filters so that it is easy to whitelist and blacklist data.""Microsoft Defender for Office 365 should improve the troubleshooting tools. It's unclear whether the device is blocked at the firewall level or at the device itself. The granularity needed for troubleshooting is currently lacking. From my perspective, Microsoft should address this issue to benefit many users who likely share the same sentiment.""We are always looking for others tools to increase automation on tasks. There can be better integration with other solutions, such as PowerPoint and email.""The UI needs to be more user-friendly.""The certification training for Defender for 365 needs to be deeper and incorporate Sentinel. I took all the security courses except one, and Sentinel isn't included.""We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend.""Microsoft Defender for Office 365 could improve by giving customers information on techniques to prevent threats. For example, information about best practices on how to protect their own devices against hackers and scammers, such as educational information or training. This would help others have a better understanding of cyber security. Additionally, there can be more security features added."

More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Cons →

"They could simplify the licensing and the pricing.""I would like to see better integration with other products.""The solution's graphical user interface (GUI) could be improved visually.""There is room for improvement, particularly in reaching out to technical support during deployment.""The solution's reporting mechanism is a little poor and could be improved.""The customer service and support could be improved if the support were available directly in Europe. Currently, the support is often managed from India, so we sometimes need to wait due to the time zone difference. It would be quicker and better if the support were provided by European staff.""Barracuda Essentials can improve by continually adding more features.""I would like to see some additional functionality in terms of employee monitoring, as part of a work-from-home security solution."

More Barracuda Email Protection Cons →

"I believe there is room for enhancement in content and web security features.""Fortinet FortiMail's pricing could be improved.""Fortinet FortiMail should allow more flexibility with the content rules.""Sometimes, authentic emails get blocked by the solution's firewall.""Sometimes, the tool flags legitimate incoming traffic as spam.""The biggest room for improvement would be the deployment. It will be hard for someone who doesn't understand the interface to deploy. If you understand it, you can find your way around the problems.""High Availability needs improvement.""FortiMail's dashboard is somewhat complex and could be made simpler."

More Fortinet FortiMail Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It's a user-base subscription."
  • "From the pricing point of view, like any other product in the market, there is scope for negotiation."
  • "Defender is a little bit more expensive as compared to others. We are in the manufacturing environment. So, we don't have a high budget for all of our endpoint devices. Its cost is a major concern for us."
  • "For licensing, it's usually a yearly package for customers who are subscribed to Office 365, but they can also pay on a monthly basis."
  • "Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is an add-on to the Office license. Many customers are purchasing this solution."
  • "Microsoft Defender for Office 365 comes with Microsoft Windows. It is free with the operating system."
  • "The solution saves money so we have seen a return on investment."
  • "Defender for 365 comes in various plans and licenses, along with other Microsoft security solutions. Purchasing this kind of package or security bundle gives good value for money, and that's what I recommend."
  • More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The price of Barracuda Essentials is better than some of the competing products."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "Barracuda licensing model is good."
  • More Barracuda Email Protection Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The licensing model for this solution is better because it is based on the box and not the number of users."
  • "It is an expensive product."
  • "The annual cost is $55,000."
  • "Pricing is straight-forward and renewable without complicated pricing structures."
  • "Pricing is based on initial license purchase and use volume."
  • "In the future I would like it if there's a possibility to lower the price of the bandwidth and UTM. It is quite expensive."
  • "This is a good solution and value for the money."
  • "If you don't need the full bundle that includes everything, you have options for the small or medium enterprise environments."
  • More Fortinet FortiMail Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Threat Explorer is an invaluable tool for me, and it plays a crucial role in helping me discern the origins of various… more »
    Top Answer:The product must provide better malware detection. The detection algorithms don't perform the way I hope they would.
    Top Answer:FortiMail possesses notable strengths, and one key feature is its store-and-forward concept.
    Top Answer:It could benefit from enhancing its functionality, especially in terms of advanced filtering. Introducing features such… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    MS Defender for Office 365
    Barracuda Essentials
    FortiMail
    Learn More
    Overview

    Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a comprehensive security solution designed to protect organizations against advanced threats in their email, collaboration, and productivity environments. It combines the power of Microsoft's threat intelligence, machine learning, and behavioral analytics to provide real-time protection against phishing, malware, ransomware, and other malicious attacks.

    With Microsoft Defender for Office 365, organizations can safeguard their email communication by detecting and blocking malicious links, attachments, and unsafe email content. It employs advanced anti-phishing capabilities to identify and prevent sophisticated phishing attacks that attempt to steal sensitive information or compromise user credentials.

    This solution also offers robust protection against malware and ransomware. It leverages machine learning algorithms to analyze email attachments and URLs in real-time, identifying and blocking malicious content before it reaches users' inboxes. Additionally, it provides advanced threat-hunting capabilities, allowing security teams to proactively investigate and respond to potential threats.

    Microsoft Defender for Office 365 goes beyond email protection and extends its security features to other collaboration tools like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. It scans files and documents stored in these platforms, ensuring that they are free from malware and other malicious content. It also provides visibility into user activities, helping organizations detect and mitigate insider threats.

    Furthermore, this solution offers rich reporting and analytics capabilities, providing organizations with insights into their security posture and threat landscape. It enables security administrators to monitor and manage security incidents, track trends, and take proactive measures to enhance their overall security posture.

    The popularity of Microsoft 365 means criminals test and design their attacks to bypass its native security features. And that means you need additional layers of defense. With Advanced Threat Protection enabled, Barracuda uses multiple layers of detection, including signature, static, and behavioral analysis, along with CPU-emulation sandboxing to accurately detect and block zero-hour targeted attacks and ransomware.

    Traditional email gateways use static rules and policies—reputation analysis, block lists, and malicious payloads—to determine if an email is malicious.

    Barracuda protects your Microsoft 365 inbox against evasive threats with a powerful AI engine that learns the unique communication patterns within your organization through access to internal and historical emails. Once it understands what legitimate emails looks like for each user, it can detect anomalies that signal malicious intent. This context-based detection is more effective at blocking targeted attacks, which are designed to bypass traditional rule-based email security.

    As cyber attacks become more sophisticated, it is crucial for email security solutions to offer multi-layered protection. Fortinet's proven email security platform, FortiMail, is a comprehensive multi-layered threat protection solution designed to secure users from the full spectrum of email-based threats, which includes zero-day threats, credential impersonation, spam, phishing, malware, and business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

    Fortinet FortiMail offers a variety of deployment models to best fit your organization’s email security needs. On-premises, private or public cloud, or hybrid email environments can be deployed and managed in-house by your team or managed by Fortinet’s data centers. FortiMail also employs virtual machines that provide robust scalability options and flexible deployment of email security infrastructure.

    Fortinet FortiMail Benefits

    Fortinet FortiMail provides your organization with the following benefits:

    • Eliminate message-based threats by using FortiMail’s advanced inspection capabilities before they can harm your users.
    • Flexible licensing ensures that you don’t have to create a license for each user as you scale your network upwards.

    • Achieve regulatory compliance with sophisticated messaging content archiving, quarantining, and routing tools.
    • Stop spam before it takes over your messaging system and network resources, ensuring that your messaging performance remains optimized.

    Fortinet FortiMail Benefits

    Some of Fortinet FortiMail’s top features include:

    • Spam and malware prevention: FortiMail employs advanced techniques and technologies, such as outbreak protection, impersonation detection, content disarm and reconstruction, and sandbox analysis to provide users with high-performing antispam and antimalware tools designed to prevent unwanted bulk email, ransomware, and other targeted attacks.
    • Powerful data loss prevention: Identity-based email encryption and archiving help prevent the loss of sensitive and important information and ensure that your organization adheres to compliance with corporate and industry regulations.
    • Automatic updates: Receive dynamic updates from the FortiGuard subscription services that automatically upgrade your antispam and antivirus functionality using intelligence gathered by Fortinet's dedicated global threat research team.
    • Seamless integration: Integrations with other Fortinet products and external third-party components enable companies to enhance their security by sharing indicators of compromise (IoCs) across a unified security system.
    • Easy email management: Gain full visibility over real-time email traffic with Fortinet FortiMail’s intuitive dashboards, rich reporting features, centralized quarantine tools, and end-user controls. Control email traffic with the solution’s full mail transfer agent and mail-handling capabilities. The solution’s quick-start setup wizard greatly reduces the complexity of deployment and management.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Fortinet FortiMail stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful anti-virus tool and its robust spam protection capabilities.

    Flamur P., head of security management at Ipko Telecommunications, writes, "Fortinet FortiMail has a lot of valuable features. It works great. It also has an antivirus feature. Support for Fortinet FortiMail was also great when my team wanted to block some geographic IPs, but couldn't figure out how to do it. The support team provided clear communication on how to resolve that issue. Another valuable feature of Fortinet FortiMail is spam filtering which tells you how many spammy emails you've received. Based on my current use cases, I'm happy with Fortinet FortiMail."

    Sample Customers
    Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is trusted by companies such as Ithaca College.
    ACT Government, Acumen Group, AGIP, Delta Dental Plans Association, Desai/Nasr Consulting Engineers, Inc., Equinox Information Systems
    Magromer Cueros y Pieles S.A.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company16%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    Logistics Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Construction Company25%
    Security Firm25%
    Manufacturing Company25%
    Educational Organization13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Construction Company7%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Real Estate/Law Firm7%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider17%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government14%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization44%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    Government5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business42%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise42%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise51%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business57%
    Midsize Enterprise36%
    Large Enterprise7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business41%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise41%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business46%
    Midsize Enterprise31%
    Large Enterprise24%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise54%
    Large Enterprise28%
    Buyer's Guide
    Barracuda Email Protection vs. Fortinet FortiMail
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Email Protection vs. Fortinet FortiMail and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    769,479 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Barracuda Email Protection is ranked 15th in Email Security with 13 reviews while Fortinet FortiMail is ranked 5th in Email Security with 56 reviews. Barracuda Email Protection is rated 8.8, while Fortinet FortiMail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Barracuda Email Protection writes "Set-it-and-forget-it type of product that doesn't require a lot of management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiMail writes "Good GUI and configuring security policies is easy but the pricing needs improvement". Barracuda Email Protection is most compared with Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration, TitanHQ SpamTitan, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Abnormal Security and Mimecast Email Security, whereas Fortinet FortiMail is most compared with Cisco Secure Email, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Barracuda Email Security Gateway, Fortinet FortiMail Cloud and Proofpoint Email Protection. See our Barracuda Email Protection vs. Fortinet FortiMail report.

    See our list of best Email Security vendors.

    We monitor all Email Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.