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Barracuda Email Protection vs Proofpoint Threat Response comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 19, 2026

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
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Email Archiving (3rd), Email Security (10th), Office 365 Protection (4th)
Proofpoint Threat Response
Ranking in Security Incident Response
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Security Incident Response category, the mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 1.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Proofpoint Threat Response is 6.7%, down from 17.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Incident Response Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Proofpoint Threat Response6.7%
Barracuda Email Protection1.8%
Other91.5%
Security Incident Response
 

Featured Reviews

Xavie Simons - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Development Manager at Procter & Gamble
Improved email security has reduced spam, simplified encrypted mail, and strengthened user trust
The best features Barracuda Email Protection offers include good spam filtering and very good sandboxing of all links, as well as good encryption. It also has integrated logging for user management of their own spam. It has better filtering technology, so few are false positives as well, with excellent anti-spam engines and logging. It is extremely easy to install, configure, and set up, and there is excellent message tracking for folks that say they have not received an email they were expecting. Integrated logging and user management make my daily work easier because it is very easy to log in and to manage this tool, hence making it a very good tool for email protection. It also has excellent, easy-to-add designated users as site administrators, and it is competitively priced. It has a user-friendly portal, strong cloud-based features, and no additional maintenance cost, along with responsive support. Barracuda Email Protection has positively impacted my organization by handling encryption better than any other tool I have used before, which has increased our email protection significantly. Our security has also increased from forty percent to sixty-five percent, especially when dealing with all the threats that come through emails. It has been a great tool because we can handle email delays and delays on file scanning. When our partners are happy, we are very happy, and it has helped us have less time chasing bad emails. The fast implementation of encrypted mail keeps employees working with less interruption since they are happy, satisfied, and secure.
reviewer2460363 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"This is one of the easiest, safest, and most secure solutions for security and email archival."
"With Barracuda Email Protection, the features I find most valuable are spam filtering, as it is primarily used for spam protection."
"The most valuable features of Barracuda Email Protection are flexibility and customization."
"The investment in Barracuda Email Protection is quite good for us because we see the value of money on it, as we are saving a lot with Barracuda Email Protection, going from paying close to 300,000 to now sitting at 100,000."
"The most helpful aspect for me is the out-of-the-box configuration, which is fairly good."
"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."
"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."
"Our ROI is100%. Our entire management and decision makers are very impressed and happy with this product."
"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."
"Proofpoint has reduced the number of major attacks on our systems."
"Support is very responsive."
"The platform's most valuable include the ability to check emails and block potential spam."
"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."
"This is truly a top-notch feature, and I have not seen such good functionality from the same kind of feature in any other tool so far."
 

Cons

"The technology works on a supervised engine, but it would be better if it ran on an unsupervised engine."
"They can still improve."
"Barracuda Essentials can improve by continually adding more features."
"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."
"Sometimes, in some cases, this might end up with their teams being unfocused or a bit thin and stretched and super busy."
"Two to three months back, we got fraudulent emails in which someone in the organization was being blamed."
"Has some quirks."
"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."
"The platform's technical support services and pricing need improvement."
"The interface within Threat Response could be made simpler."
"The interface within Threat Response could be made simpler."
"If the reporting gets improved then it would be better, but the product is running amazing as it is."
"The product has some quirks that could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is similar to that of Microsoft 365."
"The solution's pricing is moderate, where it is neither cheap nor expensive."
"We didn't have to pay a lot for the solution because we got it from a good vendor with a good user volume."
"Price-wise, this product is middle-of-the-road."
"The product is expensive."
"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 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."
"It's quite affordable to have it with this much functionality and ease to administrate."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Healthcare Company
10%
University
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise13
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?
Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, I have not seen any higher costs. I find that Barracuda Email Protection has a very good licensing model, providing capable features at a very good and...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Proofpoint Threat Response?
The pricing it's a bit expensive, setup and licensing are simpples
What needs improvement with Proofpoint Threat Response?
The platform's technical support services and pricing need improvement.
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.
 

Also Known As

Barracuda Essentials, Barracuda Forensics and Incident Response
No data available
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Email Protection vs. Proofpoint Threat Response and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.