Barracuda Email Protection vs Proofpoint Threat Response comparison

Barracuda Networks and Proofpoint are both solutions in the Security Incident Response category. Barracuda Networks is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.5, while Proofpoint is ranked #2 with an average rating of 7.5. Barracuda Networks holds a 1.9% mindshare in IRP, compared to Proofpoint’s 8.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Barracuda Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 80% of Proofpoint users who would recommend it.

Barracuda Email Protection

Read 19 Barracuda Email Protection reviews

2,722 Views
54 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Proofpoint Threat Response

Read 5 Proofpoint Threat Response reviews

488 Views
376 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Barracuda Email Protection

Proofpoint Threat Response

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 19, 2026

Proofpoint Threat Response and Barracuda Email Protection compete in the email security market. While Barracuda's feature-rich platform is preferred for comprehensive capabilities, Proofpoint's pricing strategies and customer service offer significant advantages.

Features: Proofpoint Threat Response offers automated incident analysis, threat prioritization, and integration with advanced threat detection modules. Barracuda Email Protection provides advanced phishing detection, robust data leak prevention, and impersonation protection.

Room for Improvement: Proofpoint needs to enhance its integration capabilities and improve its auto-restore feature. Barracuda could improve its reporting, integration with security awareness training platforms, and provide more flexibility in policy creation and customization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Proofpoint offers straightforward deployment and strong customer support, enhancing efficiency. Barracuda's deployment is more complex due to its wider feature set, but its customer service efficiently aids users.

Pricing and ROI: Proofpoint offers cost-effective solutions with favorable ROI through affordable pricing tiers and focused functionalities. Barracuda requires a steeper initial investment, justified over time by its extensive feature set and broad security coverage.

To learn more, read our detailed Security Incident Response Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Security Incident Response

January 2026

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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 Security Incident Response

7th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Email Archiving (2nd), Email Security (13th), Office 365 Protection (4th)

Proofpoint Threat Response

Ranking in Security Incident Response

2nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Security Incident Response category, the mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 1.9%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Proofpoint Threat Response is 8.9%, down from 14.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Security Incident Response Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Proofpoint Threat Response	8.9%
Barracuda Email Protection	1.9%
Other	89.2%

Security Incident Response

Featured Reviews

Sherif Fouad

Group ICT Manager at a mining and metals company with 501-1,000 employees

Have raised concerns about scanning engines and automation while continuing to rely on layered protection strategies

Incident response is something that requires more development from Barracuda's side. Regarding room for improvement for Barracuda Forensics and Incident Response, for the product, developing or improving the scanning engine is important, but it's a bit tricky. I know that they are working on it heavily. The difference between Barracuda and Sophos is Sophos focused heavily on cybersecurity while Barracuda tried to increase their product portfolio. Sometimes, in some cases, this might end up with their teams being unfocused or a bit thin and stretched and super busy. However, there is room for improvement. The product is great. The teams that are supporting are great. But there is always room for improvement. Even if you have a product that you would give a rating of 10 out of 10, there is always room for improvement. The day we stop improving is the day we die. Regarding the scanning engine, Barracuda Forensics and Incident Response has a very good feature where you can create automated flows for how to handle specific emails that are detected as incidents. This needs a bit of an improvement. That's the only component of Barracuda Forensics and Incident Response that I believe requires improvement.

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reviewer2460363

Chief Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Automatically remove threats from mailboxes once identified, reducing manual intervention but on-premise version doesn't scale well for large companies

Auto pull and auto restore are valuable features. Auto restore isn't quite what it should be, but it's a lot better than someone having to manually release mail back to everyone. If something's pulled and then it's later declared a false positive, it will automatically restore. They also take automatic feeds from their advanced threat detection modules. Anytime Advanced Threat Protection finds something that was allowed to go through, either a URL or attachment, it will send out a signal, and Threat Response will automatically pull all of that out of the mail files. The automation is the big thing for us. Integration capabilities: There's an API, but most of it is around how you handle incidents. We're also not using the whole Threat Response suite, just the subset. So, we've never had to or could integrate anything else. We're limited to the Exchange portion only. The whole Threat Response should be labeled as a SOAR tool. The portion we have, I would call it "SOAR-lite." I know there are a couple of others that offer a SOAR-lite, but we're just starting to look at them.

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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

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

"I'm quite satisfied with the graphical user interface for Barracuda products."

"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 helpful aspect for me is the out-of-the-box configuration, which is fairly good."

"The archiving and search features are very good."

"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."

More Barracuda Email Protection pros

"If something's pulled and then it's later declared a false positive, it will automatically restore. They also take automatic feeds from their advanced threat detection modules."

"Support is very responsive."

"The platform's most valuable include the ability to check emails and block potential spam."

"The best part of Proofpoint Threat Response is the Auto-Pull feature. Being able to pull an email back from a user's mailbox is very useful, yet I have noticed that not a lot of organizations use this kind of feature."

"It has reduced our manual efforts to remove emails from each user's inbox, and in this case we do not have to ask our IT department or users to do so."

Cons

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

"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 platform's pricing needs improvement."

"I would like to see better integration with other products."

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

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

"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."

"The technology works on a supervised engine, but it would be better if it ran on an unsupervised engine."

More Barracuda Email Protection cons

"Has some quirks."

"The platform's technical support services and pricing need improvement."

"The interface within Threat Response could be made simpler."

"The on-premise version doesn't scale well for large companies."

"If the reporting gets improved then it would be better, but the product is running amazing as it is."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"Price-wise, this product is middle-of-the-road."

"The product is expensive."

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

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

"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."

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

"The price of Barracuda Essentials is better than some of the competing products."

More Barracuda Email Protection pricing and cost advice

"The way most big companies work with Proofpoint is that they try to tie everything into an enterprise license. I can't comment on the actual costs, however I do know that alternative solutions such as Abnormal Security can be much more expensive than Proofpoint Threat Response."

"It's quite affordable to have it with this much functionality and ease to administrate."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Healthcare Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Energy/Utilities Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	5

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.

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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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Proofpoint Threat Response?

I have a vague idea because I don't know what others are charging. But we felt that putting up with the pains and having to spend more time keeping it running than we expected is still better than ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Proofpoint Threat Response?

The platform's technical support services and pricing need improvement.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Proofpoint Threat Response?

We use the product to verify and manage emails sent and received through our Microsoft Exchange server, focusing on blocking potential spam emails.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 23% of the time

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Compared 20% of the time

Mimecast Email Security vs Barracuda Email Protection

Compared 11% of the time

Proofpoint Email Protection vs Barracuda Email Protection

Compared 8% of the time

Abnormal Security vs Barracuda Email Protection

Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 21% of the time

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Compared 17% of the time

Splunk Attack Analyzer vs Proofpoint Threat Response

Compared 17% of the time

Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR vs Proofpoint Threat Response

Compared 13% of the time

Netwrix Threat Manager vs Proofpoint Threat Response

Compared 13% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda Email Protection

January 2026

Download Barracuda Email Protection product report

Buyer's Guide

Proofpoint Threat Response

January 2026

Download Proofpoint Threat Response product report

Also Known As

Barracuda Essentials, Barracuda Forensics and Incident Response

No data available

Overview

Barracuda Email Protection provides advanced security with features like AI protection and cloud-based spam blocking, making it essential for managing email risks effectively.

Barracuda Email Protection stands out with its robust malware detection, ease of use, and seamless integration with Microsoft 365, serving enterprises by simplifying email threat management. Despite its efficient spam filtering and straightforward setup, users seek improvements in email encryption, third-party vendor integration, report details, and more streamlined performance. Organizations leverage its AI capabilities for phishing detection and employee training, allowing for automated operations and comprehensive threat protection. Its archiving, search, and hands-off management are crucial for companies lacking extensive security resources, ensuring persistent email access and secure practices.

What are the key features of Barracuda Email Protection?

Cloud-Based Spam Blocking: Reduces unwanted emails effectively.
Impersonation Detection: Identifies phishing attempts seamlessly.
Malware Detection: Protects against malicious threats.
AI Protection: Enhances security with intelligent analysis.
Microsoft 365 Integration: Ensures smooth operation within existing systems.
Customizable Rules: Allows tailored security protocols.

What are the main benefits and ROI of Barracuda Email Protection?

Time Savings: Automates and streamlines email management processes.
Email Security: Maintains domain reputation by reducing spam and threats.
Comprehensive Protection: Provides a unified approach to email threats.
Central Management: Simplifies oversight with a unified console.
Reliable Support: Offers technical assistance and guidance.

In finance, healthcare, and large enterprises, Barracuda Email Protection is deployed for its reliable email archiving and retrieval, supporting compliance and data integrity. Industries benefit from its AI-powered phishing detection and employee training tools, enhancing operational security and reducing risk exposure.

Barracuda Networks

No defense can stop every attack. When something does get through, Proofpoint Threat Response takes the manual labor and guesswork out of incident response to help you resolve threats faster and more efficiently. Get an actionable view of threats, enrich alerts, and automate forensic collection and comparison. For verified threats, quarantine and contain users, hosts, and malicious email attachments - automatically or at the push of a button.

Proofpoint

Sample Customers

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

University of Waterloo, Akorn, Fenwick and West LLP

Buyer's Guide

Security Incident Response

January 2026

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