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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
13th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Email Archiving (2nd), Office 365 Protection (4th)
Fortra's Clearswift Secure ...
Ranking in Email Security
39th
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 January 2026, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 3.3%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway is 1.0%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Barracuda Email Protection3.3%
Fortra's Clearswift Secure Email Gateway1.0%
Other95.7%
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

LeeMiles - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Information Technology at St Albans High School For Girls
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
Systems Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
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

"We check the reports sometimes to see that frequent attacks and malicious emails are being blocked by the solution."
"Barracuda email protection is stable. I would give it a nine because of its strong cybersecurity features."
"The most valuable features are security and ease of use."
"I'm quite satisfied with the graphical user interface for Barracuda products."
"The solution's most valuable feature is impersonation detection."
"The most helpful aspect for me is the out-of-the-box configuration, which is fairly good."
"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 archiving and search features are very good."
"Ability to create your own content-filtering policies with relative ease."
"A stable solution."
 

Cons

"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."
"The policies are set up in Barracuda by default; we don't have any control over them."
"The platform's pricing needs improvement."
"The product must enable bulk user management."
"I would like to see some additional functionality in terms of employee monitoring, as part of a work-from-home security solution."
"Sometimes it is somewhat laggy, especially on the Archiver side. It should have improved performance on their Message Archiver."
"FTP server and TRUST Manager functionality."
"Malware needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price-wise, this product is middle-of-the-road."
"Barracuda licensing model is good."
"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."
"The price of Barracuda Essentials is better than some of the competing products."
"The price is similar to that of Microsoft 365."
"We didn't have to pay a lot for the solution because we got it from a good vendor with a good user volume."
"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."
"Despite a list price possibly around $40 per user, their market price allows customers to easily buy the solution."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise5
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: December 2025.
879,711 professionals have used our research since 2012.