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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
52
Ranking in other categories
Email Archiving (1st), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (2nd), Microsoft Security Suite (10th), Secure Email Gateway (SEG) (1st)
Barracuda Email Protection
Ranking in Email Security
14th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Email Archiving (2nd), Office 365 Protection (5th)
TitanHQ SpamTitan
Ranking in Email Security
13th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
Anti-Malware Tools (9th), Office 365 Protection (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is 12.6%, down from 17.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 2.9%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TitanHQ SpamTitan is 1.1%, 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.
Ricky Brewster - PeerSpot reviewer
Delivers reliable email security with minimal maintenance and valuable threat intelligence
If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said the user interface needed improvement, but we've just updated it. It looks really modern now, and it's a lot easier to use. At the moment, I don't have anything specific for improvement. Additionally, I would suggest different roles for users. We want the ability to lock down certain functions for certain user roles to prevent accidental changes, such as an apprentice accidentally deleting a customer.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The stability of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is fantastic."
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"Overall, I would rate Microsoft Defender for Office 365 at a ten."
"There are several features that I consider valuable."
"The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning."
"My experience with customer support and technical support for Microsoft Defender for Office 365 has been excellent."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable features are safe attachments and safe links."
"Defender helps us prioritize threats across our organization."
"The archiving and search features are very good."
"The solution is straightforward to set up."
"The best feature of Barracuda Email Protection is that it provides protection for Microsoft 365."
"I'm quite satisfied with the graphical user interface for Barracuda products."
"The solution's most valuable feature is impersonation detection."
"The beauty of Barracuda Email Protection is that it is easy to manage and simple to deploy."
"The product is easy to deploy and maintain."
"The most helpful aspect for me is the out-of-the-box configuration, which is fairly good."
"The new SpamTitan Plus with the Link Lock feature is great. We implemented it and use it as well."
"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."
"It gives our users the chance to interact with the program. They can decide if there are things that are junk mail that they don't want to be messing with, on an individual basis. Of course, I can always override that or control it from a company standpoint."
"I like the ability to go online and view mail that's been quarantined. SpamTitan lets you look at the mail and decide whether you want to release it or not."
"We have just one place to go and look at things, which makes it a lot easier for us. Our users like the fact that it is granular when they look at it. Some guys are really proficient in certain areas and this lends itself to that, which is good. They can then learn the other parts that they didn't have when we were on other systems. You can just log into the back-end and can see everything or whatever you want to see. If you need to actually go through the email and look for one to release, it is easy to find."
"It is a very easy product to use. There is one interface that services all our clients' health. Once learning the interface, we don't have to learn another one for each client. It is the same interface, which is valuable. Therefore, we find the single interface the most valuable since I have a very small team. I don't have one or two people dedicated to just SpamTitan. We all need to learn the interface and be fluent in it. So, having a unified single interface is a big deal for us. I don't have to teach my people five different interfaces in order to be managing a product. They use one interface for all our clients. It is a single pane of glass, which is huge for us."
"We are satisfied with the performance and spam filtering provided by TitanHQ SpamTitan. The reporting feature and customizations as per our requirements are also good."
"The solution is not hard to manage."
 

Cons

"I'd like some additional features any product can give me to protect our environment in a better way."
"There's room for improvement regarding the time frame for retrieving emails."
"Configuration at the mid-level could be improved for the support team."
"There is room for improvement in terms of reporting."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's Mac functionality requires improvement to deliver the same level of protection found on Windows devices."
"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."
"It would be better if it were more scalable. It depends on the architecture, but we would like to make it more scalable for both data centers."
"The visibility into threats is not up to the mark, as I do not have control. I rate my experience with Microsoft Defender for Office 365 as six out of ten due to troubleshooting and pricing concerns."
"They could simplify the licensing and the pricing."
"Two to three months back, we got fraudulent emails in which someone in the organization was being blamed."
"The solution's reporting mechanism is a little poor and could be improved."
"Sometimes it is somewhat laggy, especially on the Archiver side. It should have improved performance on their Message Archiver."
"I would like to see better integration with other products."
"There is room for improvement, particularly in reaching out to technical support during deployment."
"The product must enable bulk user management."
"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 admin management portal needs a facelift. I've asked them for a way to authenticate admins of the organizations that want to admin the SpamTitan product itself. Adding additional management security would be a great feature. There are a few tiny improvements they could also make. For instance, the GUI itself is a little outdated, and it could be more user friendly. The same goes for ArcTitan. It's got a horrible GUI that's worse than SpamTitan. It also could use that authentication mechanism upgrade as well. I would also suggest combining the two products into one control panel. ."
"Specifying your own filtering rules can be somewhat tricky. You can leave it alone or add your own filter rules using regular expressions. It would be nice to get a little more help configuring the regular expressions. That is quite complicated, and it's something I struggled with."
"SpamTitan is not particularly configurable. I basically have to accept their parameters for a lot of things."
"I believe the product is configured for the US or European market, not the Latin American market, and the scoring system is a little too strict for our market. Most companies in Latin America don't even have proper domain configuration, which can cause their emails to be filtered as spam. They might not have DMARC or SDF configuration, so we often have to change the scoring threshold to let legitimate emails through. It's not SpamTitan's fault, but the optimization isn't the greatest considering our market."
"The overall GUI is utilitarian. It has a spreadsheet feel versus a nice software that is guided. I am sure they're going to improve it over time. It could look a little prettier. It needs some lipstick. They should get rid of unfamiliar words like ham and spam, helping the user to better understand what they are clicking through."
"The SpamTitan user interface is not amazing, but I don't mind it. I know they are releasing a new one soon. I have seen it and it looks a lot better. That has been an area that needs improvement."
"I'd like to see something like "My First SpamTitan," by which I mean, "Guide me through the things I need to set, and tell me about the things that you're setting already." That way I would get a good feeling for setting up the product, rather than having to figure it out by myself, which is what I did."
"If they had a little more documentation explaining how to use regex, or if they could include that inside of the cloud interface so that it generates regex code based on the parameters you input, that would be a lot more useful for people who aren't familiar with coding languages and HTML."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Microsoft Defender is expensive. I typically recommend it only if clients have the budget. Otherwise, I would suggest an alternative."
"The license is expensive because the cost is based on the number of users."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is an add-on to the Office license. Many customers are purchasing this solution."
"For licensing, it's usually a yearly package for customers who are subscribed to Office 365, but they can also pay on a monthly basis."
"I know that the product is incredibly 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."
"Compared to other brands, Microsoft Defender for Office 365's pricing is competitive."
"It's a user-base subscription."
"The solution's pricing is moderate, where it is neither cheap nor expensive."
"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."
"The price is similar to that of Microsoft 365."
"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."
"Price-wise, this product is middle-of-the-road."
"Barracuda licensing model is good."
"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 cluster was an additional cost. We had to get some more licenses to get to that level. It's well worth it because it means peace of mind for everyone."
"We used to use FortiClient and Symantec Messaging Gateway. We didn't like Symantec's solution, but we switched because of the cost. SpamTitan was more cost-effective than either of the other solutions."
"We're satisfied with the pricing and licensing for SpamTitan."
"The pricing is ideal. A lot of other anti-spams are integrated in Exchange, counting technical mailboxes that are not sending any emails outside. So, they are not scanned and only for internal communication. SpamTitan only counts the emails that it scans. This is one of the best licensing models that I saw for anti-spam solutions because it is counting dynamically the number of emails that senders are sending. It counts these uniquely by week. It provides a very realistic picture. This is very useful because we are not counting the emails doing inbound or outbound notifications from our company."
"Compared to the market, its price is fair."
"When it comes to the scalability of it, it really doesn't matter much because of the way that it is priced. You can put it on somebody who is small or big."
"The pricing and licensing are acceptable. The licensing is somewhat different; TitanHQ gives us a peak cap of simultaneous users, which they calculate as the number of email addresses viewed through so many days or weeks. That's considered our number of users, but it isn't always a one-to-one relationship, making it harder to resell. We can't say precisely that the solution costs X per month per user, but that's how we present the price to potential customers, and we just ensure we receive more than we pay to TitanHQ. The licensing hasn't caused us any problems, but it would be better if the pricing were per-user. I know that's not easy to achieve on a technical level."
"The price point is still of a reasonable nature. It is reasonable for the services that they offer. They are very reasonable, and that is one of the factors why we decided on SpamTitan a long time ago."
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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
19%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
University
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Comms Service Provider
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?
Microsoft is quite affordable with a lot of features available for any size organization.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Defender for Office 365?
Microsoft could improve by offering recommendations for domain spoofing attacks, especially scenarios where DNS recor...
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?
The pricing model is reasonable money for the product. It is rated highly because of its affordability and its great ...
What needs improvement with TitanHQ SpamTitan?
If you had asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said the user interface needed improvement, but we've just updated ...
 

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: May 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.