Barracuda Email Protection vs IRONSCALES comparison

Barracuda Email Protection

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

Barracuda Email Protection and IRONSCALES compete in the email security category. IRONSCALES appears to have the upper hand due to its advanced AI-driven features.

Features: Barracuda Email Protection provides robust spam filtering, archiving solutions, and AI-based impersonation detection. IRONSCALES offers AI-driven threat detection, a mobile app for incident management, and a global community for automated threat resolution.

Room for Improvement: Barracuda Email Protection could enhance its reporting capabilities and integration with security awareness training platforms. IRONSCALES might benefit from further reducing false positives and exploring deeper integration options with other security systems.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Barracuda Email Protection is known for an easy deployment process and excellent customer service. IRONSCALES provides a streamlined, self-service deployment model with efficient, though less hands-on, technical support.

Pricing and ROI: Barracuda is cost-effective with quick ROI due to lower setup costs, ideal for budget-conscious buyers. IRONSCALES, despite higher initial costs, promises long-term ROI with its superior features, appealing to those prioritizing advanced security measures.

To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda Email Protection vs. IRONSCALES Report (Updated: July 2025).

Barracuda Email Protection vs. IRONSCALES

July 2025

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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

14th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Email Archiving (2nd), Office 365 Protection (5th)

IRONSCALES

Ranking in Email Security

18th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (19th), Secure Email Gateway (SEG) (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 3.1%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IRONSCALES is 1.9%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Email Security

Featured Reviews

LeeMiles

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.

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Hemeshen Govender

Technology CyberSecurity at Oryx industries

Applies AI automation to clearly identify and stop a lot of phishing emails

The solution captures a bit more of the unknown, quantifies it, and applies intelligence to it to pick out and stop a lot of phishing emails that come through. The solution improved our response to phishing attempts. IRONSCALES has a virtual assistant and some AI intelligence that's applied to it. That was the main differentiator between IRONSCALES and Microsoft. The solution's AI automation clearly identifies phishing emails and gives you an overall indication of why it found the mail to be malicious. It does the whole analysis for you to see why the email was deemed a phishing email. The solution's response time is better than that of our previous tool. The solution's user interface is pretty straightforward and user-friendly.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Barracuda email protection is stable. I would give it a nine because of its strong cybersecurity features."

"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."

"We check the reports sometimes to see that frequent attacks and malicious emails are being blocked by the solution."

"The most valuable features are security and ease of use."

"The archiving and search features are very good."

"The solution's most valuable feature is impersonation detection."

"The most valuable aspect includes attempts to spoof or compromise domains from external sources."

More Barracuda Email Protection pros

"There is buzz around phishing awareness training. When I make a campaign, all of a sudden people in our organization are talking, thinking, and wondering about it. Therefore, it keeps people on their toes. That is perfect because it does exactly what we want it to do."

"The fact that it is set-and-forget is valuable. Once you turn it on, you very rarely have to micromanage it, whereas, with a lot of spam filters, you have to go in very often."

"For what was being offered with IRONSCALES, I feel like we got an incredible deal."

"Their anti-phishing platform is absolutely fantastic. The automated AI piece is amazing, and their technical support is fantastic."

"The report function through Gmail is probably the most valuable feature. The next most valuable features are simulation and training."

"AI-driven phishing detection and incident remediation are valuable. It saves time from having to do manual analysis and investigation, and we also get alerts for phishing emails."

"The most valuable features of the solution are that it is easy to set it up, install, and manage the product."

"I would say the most valuable feature is what they call Themis. It's like a virtual analyst that uses the decisions that system admins make to generate a score for whether an email is legitimate, spam, or phishing. It gets better based on the decisions that we make over time. The automation piece is great as well. The integrated approach of email security combined with employee awareness training is excellent."

More IRONSCALES pros

Cons

"I would like to see some additional functionality in terms of employee monitoring, as part of a work-from-home security solution."

"Two to three months back, we got fraudulent emails in which someone in the organization was being blamed."

"Barracuda Essentials can improve by continually adding more features."

"Sometimes it is somewhat laggy, especially on the Archiver side. It should have improved performance on their Message Archiver."

"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."

"The solution's reporting mechanism is a little poor and could be improved."

"The policies are set up in Barracuda by default; we don't have any control over them."

"The platform's pricing needs improvement."

More Barracuda Email Protection cons

"The integration with Google Suite needs to be better. it's something they can work on."

"IRONSCALES should bundle more features together instead of separating them and charging additional licensing fees."

"I think the tool can continue to hone the product to ensure the detections are accurate."

"There is a feature called Account Takeover, which isn't what I want it to be able to do. I know that they're working on that, but when they first started the Account Takeover feature in incident management, it didn't have much information. It didn't have any usability to it. I already had tools in place that were better."

"In addition to integrated training, they should also have personalized training that you don't have to do as part of a phishing campaign or a simulation."

"I would like it if IRONSCALES had some sort of reminder mechanism, meaning IRONSCALES knows if a user completed the training or not. As long as it hasn't been completed, it keeps reminding every so often, alerts the manager, etc. Right now, it is all in the hands of the employee, and not all of them continue the process, which is a shame."

"There's room for improvement in the campaign management. IRONSCALES has many built-in templates that I use, but you can also build templates from scratch. However, the interface for creating custom templates needs to be updated."

"The only thing that I could say is that some of the reporting features could be better."

More IRONSCALES cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We didn't have to pay a lot for the solution because we got it from a good vendor with a good user volume."

"Barracuda licensing model is good."

"The price is similar to that of Microsoft 365."

"The solution's pricing is moderate, where it is neither cheap nor expensive."

"The product is expensive."

"Despite a list price possibly around $40 per user, their market price allows customers to easily buy the solution."

"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."

More Barracuda Email Protection pricing and cost advice

"They are pretty much the same as all the other competitors in the market."

"The product is available as a middle-priced tool. I think it is not the cheapest solution."

"I don't know about its pricing because I don't run the budget or pay the bills, but if it was extortionate, we probably would be looking to scrap it, and because we are not, I assume its price is okay."

"We pay $3000 plus a little more a year for the number of employees we have, and we're not even that big. The solution is at the higher end in terms of cost. It's not the most expensive product, but I would say it's worth the price if you have a high volume of email traffic. In our case, the solution has inspected over 162,000 emails between three and four months. It saved us a lot of time and money. It's a worthwhile investment because a bad actor only has to succeed once; we must defend against everything in our business. IRONSCALES offers a sense of security and confidence from being well protected."

"As compared to everything else we looked at, it was good. It was the best value for the dollars."

"Considering the value it provides, it is definitely worth the cost. We don't have to do manual analysis and remediation of phishing emails, which saves us a lot of hours. Its licensing is based on the number of users being supported and the number of email addresses being protected. I'm not aware of any additional costs."

"The tool is not very cheap, but it is affordable."

"There is an installation cost. Since we have this as a managed service, we pay for licensing and the managed service itself. Other than that, there are no additional costs."

More IRONSCALES pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

University

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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?

What do you like most about IRONSCALES?

The solution captures a bit more of the unknown, quantifies it, and applies intelligence to it to pick out and stop a lot of phishing emails that come through.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IRONSCALES?

The product is available as a middle-priced tool. I think it is not the cheapest solution. There are other solutions apart from IRONSCALES that are more expensive, while some are a little bit more ...

What needs improvement with IRONSCALES?

I think maybe on the side of the awareness training, the tool can improve a little more information and have some other languages since even though English is good, Spanish is not so good. The tool...

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Product Reports

Barracuda Email Protection

August 2025

Download Barracuda Email Protection product report

Download IRONSCALES product report

August 2025

Also Known As

Barracuda Essentials

No data available

Overview

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.

Barracuda Networks

IRONSCALES secures against business email compromises, phishing, and email-based attacks. Protects Microsoft 365 users by enhancing spam filters, automating threat mitigation, and providing phishing awareness training.

Deploy IRONSCALES to inspect, report, and quarantine threats with a sandbox feature, and run simulations to train staff worldwide, adding an extra security layer. Communicates via API to ensure ongoing email security. Offers threat-sharing capability, AI, easy setup, scalability, stability, and effective email security. Automated detection and response, mobile app notifications, integration with Microsoft 365, phishing training modules, and a user-friendly interface, including an Outlook extension to report suspicious emails. Reduces manual analysis time, saving considerable effort.

What are the most important features of IRONSCALES?

Threat-sharing capability: Allows users to share threat intelligence easily.
Excellent AI: Utilizes advanced AI for accurate threat detection.
Easy setup: Simplifies deployment with minimal effort.
Scalability: Easily scales to meet users' requirements.
Stability: Provides strong and reliable performance.
Effective email security: Offers a robust defense against email threats.
Automated detection and response: Quickly identifies and mitigates threats.
Mobile app notifications: Keeps users informed through mobile alerts.
Microsoft 365 integration: Seamlessly integrates with Microsoft 365.
Phishing training modules: Educates users on phishing threats.
User-friendly interface: Simplifies user interaction.
Outlook extension: Facilitates reporting of suspicious emails.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in the reviews?

Reduces manual analysis time: Saves effort by automating threat response.
Cost-effectiveness: Though pricing is high, it offers robust features that potentially justify the expense.
Improved email security: Enhances overall email protection.
Enhanced threat detection: Utilizes AI for accurate threat identification.
Comprehensive training: Provides extensive phishing awareness training.
Increased operational efficiency: Simplifies security management tasks.

In specific industries, IRONSCALES can be implemented to address varied email security needs. For instance, financial services may benefit from robust threat mitigation and phishing training to protect sensitive data. Healthcare organizations could utilize features like AI-driven detection and sandboxing to comply with stringent regulations. Technology firms might value the easy setup and scalability to keep up with rapid growth and evolving threats. Retailers can leverage mobile app notifications and automated response to ensure continuous protection against email-based attacks. Education sectors may find phishing awareness training modules particularly useful to educate staff and students about potential threats.

Sample Customers

ACT Government, Acumen Group, AGIP, Delta Dental Plans Association, Desai/Nasr Consulting Engineers, Inc., Equinox Information Systems

Allegheny Millwork, Ayrshire College, Nium, Orris, Paramount School District, Pres Les, PRT Staffing, Recovery Unplugged, Telit, WebHelp