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Barracuda Email Protection vs TitanHQ SpamTitan comparison

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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

Microsoft Defender for Offi...
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Ranking in Email Security
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (11th)
Barracuda Email Protection
Ranking in Email Security
13th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Email Archiving (3rd), Office 365 Protection (4th)
TitanHQ SpamTitan
Ranking in Email Security
15th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (17th), Office 365 Protection (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is 12.9%, down from 18.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 2.7%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TitanHQ SpamTitan is 1.2%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

Tolu Omolaja - PeerSpot reviewer
Great URL scanning and attachment scanning, but I would like more proactive threat analysis
The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning. URL scanning involves an automatic scan of links and emails. When a user clicks on a link within an email, the system promptly checks the link's safety. If the link is deemed safe, access is granted automatically. However, if it is flagged as unsafe, we receive feedback and notification to caution us about the potentially harmful link. At this point, we are presented with the option to proceed or return. I have personally witnessed the system identify a few unsafe links, making this the primary advantage of using the solution. The second crucial aspect is the scanning of attachments. When an email containing an attachment arrives, we receive a notification of the new email, along with information that the attachment is being scanned for threats. This additional layer of security provides peace of mind for our organization. While Microsoft Defender for Office 365 offers numerous features, these two stand out as particularly impressive and valuable to us.
LeeMiles - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
George Kajaia - PeerSpot reviewer
Work hours are not lost searching through spam emails to determine which emails are legitimate
In history on the reporting graph, when you are trying to search for sender by address, it won't search by domain. I could send an email from SendGrid with my domain, but with SpamTitan, if you search by that domain then it wouldn't search it. It only searches from the field, not in the envelope field. Unfortunately, mass mailing companies, like SendGrid, send email with the form address and that completely differs from the domain envelope form address. There is no way to search for the envelope form. So, I gave them an idea to improve this filtering. For example, if I have to search an email sent by SendGrid, then I am forced to search by the recipient, then find the emails marked as spam. This is quite a huge hassle. They told me that they are aware of this and will try to add it, but they haven't added it yet. I would like to implement a secondary delivery pool for mass mailings, having an alternate pool for mass mailing lists since there is only a single mail queue with SpamTitan. For example, if 10,000 emails are being sent, then the queue will be large. Unfortunately, without a secondary delivery pool, legitimate emails will wait in the queue to be delivered to my email. Therefore, I would like to have two queues: one for everyday emails and another for mass mailings. Now, I have to decide whether to buy a second SpamTitan license just for this reason because I am very satisfied with the functionality of SpamTitan overall and don't want to use another sender's appliance for this. From 2020 to 2021, there was a huge switch in the types of spam coming in. SpamTitan's anti-spam should be enabled to catch this spam. The spam catching rate went down over the last three to four years. I think this is because spammers are evolving and using different methods to send spam emails. The phishing rate of SpamTitan is not great, even Exchange Online Protection catches phishing better than SpamTitan. The most worrying are the phishing emails. I would like SpamTitan to upgrade and improve the phishing catch rate. The sandbox of the Bitdefender engine is not working correctly. They sent me an email that they pulled it because it was not working as it was intended to work. So, they are working on this as well, and maybe the sandbox will be fixed. The sandbox is for viruses. If something goes through then it is sent to the sandbox for analysis. However, I am not using the sandbox right now. I am just quarantining this type of attachment right away.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable features are safe attachments and safe links."
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"It gives us visibility into threats and, for endpoints, it helps us to prioritize threats. We used to have a lack of visibility, but now our time to detect and respond has decreased."
"The most valuable aspect of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is its ability to protect us from malware."
"I would say that 90% of the spam and phishing attack emails get blocked right off the bat."
"Defender for Office 365 has helped eliminate having to look at multiple dashboards and that is the aspect I like most about it. It is simpler, effective, and convenient. The users like the process efficiency."
"Overall, I would rate Microsoft Defender for Office 365 at a ten."
"The most valuable feature is the integration. It's a single console, so we don't have to switch around between multiple products. Another valuable feature is the ease of operations and maintenance."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Barracuda Email Protection are flexibility and customization."
"The archiving and search features are very good."
"We check the reports sometimes to see that frequent attacks and malicious emails are being blocked by the solution."
"The solution is straightforward to set up."
"I'm quite satisfied with the graphical user interface for Barracuda products."
"Barracuda email protection is stable. I would give it a nine because of its strong cybersecurity features."
"The key differentiator of TitanHQ for its partners is the Sandboxing Service. The email filtering will open up any attachments and run them through two antivirus sandboxes before they reach you. You can pretty much guarantee there's not going to be a virus in them. I've not seen anyone else do that."
"I have found the feature that creates seamless categorization of emails valuable. This is most likely done by having a large database to compare and to identify what are the domains that are currently spammers."
"The spam filtering is the most valuable part. When we first started using it, 15 years ago, there weren't many solutions that worked well, were user-friendly, and powerful."
"It is way more than just spam filtering. The reason I bought it was not just to control our spam, but to stop the evil guys from sending us phishing or all sorts of harmful emails. I can see the daily or weekly reports of how many of those types of things that it stops for me."
"The most valuable feature is the Link Lock, which prevents our users from clicking on links that haven't been verified."
"They have something called Pattern Filtering, which has been a godsend... For example, if I don't want any email to ever come through that has the term "hot dog" in it, whether it be in the subject, the title, or anywhere else, I can immediately block such emails, company-wide. That has saved me so much time."
"URL blocking is helpful. It will block any URL sending out lots of spam or phishing. It will rename the URL itself and send it to the user. The admin will block it, or you can allow users to release it if you want."
"If all you have is a solution that looks at every piece of email and applies the same types of rules, you don't get a very smart solution. Whereas, if you can do it per mailbox or per domain, like you can with SpamTitan, that means you are effectively able to configure it almost per-user, which is great."
 

Cons

"We noticed that from time to time, Microsoft's stability does have problems. Sometimes the service goes up and down. Sometimes they change without prior notice."
"We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend."
"Sometimes, phishing emails manage to pass through the filter, so the system needs to enhance its phishing email detection capabilities."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 should improve the troubleshooting tools. It's unclear whether the device is blocked at the firewall level or at the device itself. The granularity needed for troubleshooting is currently lacking. From my perspective, Microsoft should address this issue to benefit many users who likely share the same sentiment."
"Microsoft could improve by offering recommendations for domain spoofing attacks, especially scenarios where DNS records like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are not properly published."
"Too many false positives and lacks an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites."
"This product's effectiveness could be improved, in terms of detecting unwanted spam or even malware between the emails, compared to other products."
"We are always looking for others tools to increase automation on tasks. There can be better integration with other solutions, such as PowerPoint and email."
"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 policies are set up in Barracuda by default; we don't have any control over them."
"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 graphical user interface (GUI) could be improved visually."
"The technology works on a supervised engine, but it would be better if it ran on an unsupervised engine."
"I would like to see some additional functionality in terms of employee monitoring, as part of a work-from-home security solution."
"The product must enable bulk user management."
"The platform's pricing needs improvement."
"We're so used to it now. If anything, there should be more ease of access for the users. If you're on our mail server, there should be easier access for you to better manage your own mailbox."
"The setup was a little difficult, but they did have people who helped me so I eventually got there. They had a change and my IT people had to do some stuff. There was something about pointers. I don't remember the details where we had a little trouble, but they were changing some things around."
"It's been the same interface for ten years and some things are hard to find, even after using it for years."
"The analysis of ransomware attachments could be improved. Other solutions seem to detect ransomware faster than SpamTitan does."
"It could be improved a little bit on the speed side. When I am trying to troubleshoot a mail message that somebody is looking for in SpamTitan, sometimes setting up the filters for the quarantine is a little bit pokey."
"Some of the menus on the dashboard could be easier to navigate. It takes a little while to find things."
"I would also like to see SpamTitan improve on its antivirus software. I believe they're using Bitdefender and ClamAV. A problem with them is that they sometimes miss Trojans and malicious sites. We have internal antivirus software as well, and when we receive emails we see that our local antivirus software has found Trojans in them."
"The quarantine email message that users get on a scheduled basis is something users generally don't pay attention to, like every other communication they get from IT. The formatting of the quarantined email report that goes to the users on a regular basis is a little confusing for them. That could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very expensive."
"Defender is a little bit more expensive as compared to others. We are in the manufacturing environment. So, we don't have a high budget for all of our endpoint devices. Its cost is a major concern for us."
"I was working in the government and it was too expensive for us to use our Microsoft products."
"Compared to other brands, Microsoft Defender for Office 365's pricing is competitive."
"The product is expensive."
"Defender for 365 comes in various plans and licenses, along with other Microsoft security solutions. Purchasing this kind of package or security bundle gives good value for money, and that's what I recommend."
"For large enterprise organizations, they can definitely afford it, but for small and medium organizations, they might struggle to cover the expenses."
"The license is expensive because the cost is based on the number of users."
"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."
"Despite a list price possibly around $40 per user, their market price allows customers to easily buy the solution."
"The solution's pricing is moderate, where it is neither cheap nor expensive."
"The price of Barracuda Essentials is better than some of the competing products."
"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."
"Barracuda licensing model is good."
"It is very good. We actually ended up saving money from our previous solution."
"The pricing is very reasonable and very comparable in the industry... Their licensing structure does leave a little bit to be desired. I would like it to be easier to understand how I can add licenses and update things."
"It's priced very reasonably. There are no additional licensing costs that affect me."
"We are on a per-user or per-mailbox monthly subscription. We are happy with the price of the solution. When comparing it to other solutions it is much cheaper."
"I don't deal with pricing. In terms of licensing, the last I heard was that the licensing for users in SpamTitan isn't fully functioning because of some integration issues with Microsoft. I know we have more than 20% on our licensing at the moment, but the way the licensing is supposed to run makes a lot of sense for us. We are looking forward to that part getting implemented correctly."
"We're happy with their licensing model. It was a major factor in why we chose them."
"Cloud-based solutions charge per mailbox, which isn't ideal sometimes. A company could have 300 total mailboxes and only 50 in regular use, but they would have to pay the same for all of them. I want a cloud-based solution that gives a price based on the volume of email traffic."
"The pricing for this solution is fair, and comparable with other products."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Threat Explorer is an invaluable tool for me, and it plays a crucial role in helping me discern the origins of variou...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Money-wise, it is a part of the Office 365 ( /products/office-365-reviews ) suite, making it slightly more expensive ...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
The main area for improvement is simplifying the implementation and rollout process. There are many conditions to be ...
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 t...
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 ...
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 defa...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TitanHQ SpamTitan?
Pricing is affordable. We renewed for three years, and the cost is reasonable.
What needs improvement with TitanHQ SpamTitan?
The GUI is problematic. It's a mess and absolute rubbish now. We also face issues with the settings that are not yet ...
 

Also Known As

MS Defender for Office 365
Barracuda Essentials
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is trusted by companies such as Ithaca College.
ACT Government, Acumen Group, AGIP, Delta Dental Plans Association, Desai/Nasr Consulting Engineers, Inc., Equinox Information Systems
De Montfort University, Scope Services, Park County School District, NRC, Quality Smith, Toyota, CarTrawler, Videotron
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Email Protection vs. TitanHQ SpamTitan and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.