Barracuda Email Protection vs Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense comparison

Barracuda Email Protection vs. Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense

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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

12th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

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

Cisco Secure Email Threat D...

Ranking in Email Security

27th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 3.0%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is 1.1%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Email Security Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Barracuda Email Protection	3.0%
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense	1.1%
Other	95.9%

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.

Read full review

Enrique-Diaz Jolly

Principal Consulting Engineer, Founder, Own at Jolly Security Inc

Provides comprehensive threat protection with suggestions for modernizing controls

I use the email gateway as the core of the email exchange between the Internet and our domain. The email gateway serves as the email exchanger The product offers protection, email security, anti-spam, and antivirus. It includes threat intelligence with advanced malware protection and many…

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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 are security and ease of use."

"The beauty of Barracuda Email Protection is that it is easy to manage and simple to deploy."

"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."

"I would rate the solution nine out of ten."

"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."

"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

"The advanced threat analytics and URL filtering in threat detection are good features that are working well."

"The ability to see east-west traffic is its most valuable feature. Traditionally, email defense focuses on north-south, inbound-outbound, egress-ingress traffic. With Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox, it's able to quickly identify, track, tag, and categorize emails that are internal. That can typically give us visibility into if there's an internal compromised account (for example). Someone can then use that internal compromised account to email additional accounts with either malicious software or links, but internal within that Office tenant. Effectively, that email message never leaves the tenant. Any of the mail gateways really do not have any method or way of seeing this traffic since it's not leaving the environment."

"It has an efficient email filtering feature."

"The product offers protection, email security, anti-spam, and antivirus."

"It's very easy to deploy and configure."

"The features and functionalities are much better than Microsoft's in-built Defender plan."

"I highly recommend it as one of the best choices."

"This solution is easy to use."

More Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense pros

Cons

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

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

"The product must enable bulk user management."

"They could simplify the licensing and the pricing."

"There is room for improvement, particularly in reaching out to technical support during deployment."

"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."

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

"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."

More Barracuda Email Protection cons

"The behavioral analysis capability of Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is not particularly helpful for identifying new, evolving threats within my company, as it keeps flagging legitimate emails as malicious."

"The search area has room for improvement. When you go to the next page, it remains at the bottom of the current page that you're on. Also, under the reports section, it allows you to see any "convictions," but if you want to search for those convictions you have to remember when they all came in and go back and edit the search accordingly. You cannot click on the list of convictions to actually see if you had a spike at a certain time."

"The tool gives false positives and it needs to be more accurate. I would like to see AI as a new feature."

"There is still room for improvement in terms of integrations with other Cisco tools and non-Cisco tools. There is also some room for improvement needed in terms of the reporting."

"The learning curve shows that in the beginning, there are numerous false positives. For one month, we had to reclassify the false positives manually until the system learned."

"This solution could be improved by integration with Sandbox."

"The pricing could always be better."

"Cisco's multiple product lines and verticals made this just one of their many verticals, and we could see a shift in focus."

More Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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 is similar to that of Microsoft 365."

"The product is expensive."

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

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

"Barracuda licensing model is good."

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

More Barracuda Email Protection pricing and cost advice

"Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox does not have any competition with Sophos, Trend Micro, or other vendors of the world. However, there is a pricing premium for the solution. One has to look at it from that angle that while they are buying Cisco, there will be a premium, and Cisco justifies that premium value. That's why they're charging a high price."

"The solution’s pricing is manageable."

"It is expensive compared to other vendors."

"The feedback from vendors and customer is that it is expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Marketing Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	7

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Secure Email Threat Defense?

Comparatively with other products, the pricing of Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense is normal. As a technical guide, I am not very aware of the pricing details.

What needs improvement with Secure Email Threat Defense?

We have deployed Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense in two customer environments. It is still in development as a new product. Some customer requirements, such as sending logs to a Syslog server, ar...

What is your primary use case for Secure Email Threat Defense?

We are working with Cloud Mail Gateway and on-premise mail gateways. We have worked with Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense.

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Product Reports

Barracuda Email Protection

Download Barracuda Email Protection product report

Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense

Download Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense product report

Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense report

Also Known As

Barracuda Essentials

Cisco Secure Email Cloud Mailbox, Cisco CMD, Cisco Cloud Mailbox Defense

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

Cisco's secure email threat defense is designed to provide comprehensive protection against email-based threats. With the increasing sophistication of cyber attacks, it is crucial for organizations to have a robust solution in place to safeguard their email communications.

The product offers advanced threat detection capabilities, leveraging machine learning algorithms and real-time analysis to identify and block malicious emails. It scans incoming and outgoing emails for suspicious attachments, links, and content, ensuring that only safe and legitimate emails reach the users' inbox.

To combat phishing attacks, our solution employs advanced anti-phishing techniques, including URL reputation analysis and email header analysis. It proactively detects and blocks phishing emails, preventing users from falling victim to fraudulent schemes and protecting sensitive information.

The Secure Email Threat Defense also includes robust anti-malware and anti-spam features. It scans email attachments for malware and viruses, preventing them from infiltrating the organization's network. Additionally, it filters out spam emails, reducing the clutter in users' inboxes and improving productivity.

Administrators have full visibility and control over email security. They can set up customizable policies to enforce security measures, such as blocking specific file types or restricting email access from certain domains. Detailed reports and analytics provide insights into email threats and help in fine-tuning the security settings.

Cisco

Sample Customers

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

Luiss University, Lone Star College, T-Systems, Magyar Telekom

Barracuda Email Protection vs. Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense