We performed a comparison between Barracuda Email Security Gateway and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Barracuda comes out on top in this comparison. Our reviewers agree that Barracuda is powerful and fairly priced. In addition, it has excellent customer support.
"The malicious URL scanning, as well as the anti-malware features, have been really useful for us in our environment."
"I love the Advanced Malware Protection feature. It works very well... The appliance has more security such as SDF, DKIM, DMARC, and encryption."
"The added value of it is that every migration to a new version is initiated by the Cisco version itself, so that is a bunch of work that you don't have to do on the Cisco ESA system on-premise. As it becomes a safe platform, you don't need to invest anything in your own data center or in your upgrade path."
"The solution is very configurable. It has enabled us to configure some specific filters to stop emails that general configurations didn't stop. It's a powerful solution. It can analyze a lot of emails simultaneously, with no problems of capacity or system load."
"There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails."
"The filtering is definitely better at catching both spam and malicious messages, and there's a lot of extremely granular ability for setting up rules. You can do it the way you want to. The Microsoft solution tends to be pretty limited in how it allows some of that to be done."
"Cisco Secure Email Cloud Gateway has allowed our users to be able to concentrate on the emails that they do receive. Previously, our users had to deal with nine million additional emails across the organization, which is nearly 1,000 emails per user to have to deal with a month. That's a massive amount for our staff to deal with and probably several hours of their time. We have a lot of clinical staff, being a hospital. We want to make our staff as productive as possible. By removing a lot of that spam and phishing type emails, this allows them to do their job."
"It is doing its work. It is doing what it was actually designed to do. It has ensured we don't have business email compromises, and it has also ensured that our brand Galaxy is unique all year round."
"It is very simple to whitelist addresses."
"It is a really good product with a lot of features. It is responsive, updated, and modern. It is easy to use and has an easy interface for non-IT users. Its dashboard is also quite fine. It is also quite flexible and has an API at the backend."
"Eliminating inbox clutter creates an opportunity to be more productive instead of wasting time manually sorting through spam."
"The client has the option to blacklist or whitelist any email address or domain based on the sender and recipient filters. If they want, they can restrict any IP addresses so email won't be received from those IP addresses."
"Great at blocking spam."
"The solution's anti-spam features are its most valuable aspect."
"We find the email security to be valuable."
"The most valuable feature of Barracuda Email Security Gateway is that it blocks almost 99 percent of threats from users' email inboxes."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is the ease of use."
"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 basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"The deployment capability is a great feature."
"At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us."
"The risk level notifications are most valuable. We get to know what kind of intrusion or attack is there, and we can fix a problem on time."
"Safe attachments, safe links, policies, and the ability to protect from zero-day threats are the most valuable features."
"The solution is very easy to use. All you have to do is to assign the license to the end-user and it's done. The customer will only have the feature activated, and the solution will monitor the emails to determine if they are a threat or not."
"I would like more functionality and how to use it for Level 2 type staff. The biggest issue is it needs to be easier to use and navigate."
"The Forged Email Detection feature needs improvement, particularly with domain. The sensors are not that good and the rules sets are unclear."
"The area of license renewal should be improved. We normally renew our license every year. There is a feature called smart licensing, and I switched from the legacy mode to the smart licensing mode because of what I thought smart licensing does. I thought it would make licensing renewal seamless and very swift, but ever since I've switched to smart licensing, each time I want to renew my license, it is a whole lot of headache. The process is not smooth, and I had to keep calling Cisco TAC to see how the issue can be resolved. At one point, I wanted to revert back to the legacy mode, but I can't revert. Once you switch from the legacy mode to the smart licensing mode, you can't revert. They should improve on the visibility of the smart licensing mode so that it can indeed be smart and easier to use for the license renewal every year. That is one challenge."
"The configuration UI should be made more intuitive. Currently, it takes a while to understand how to do the basic configurations."
"We have been struggling in the last month with Cisco encryption and with the S/MIME encryption. I don't know if it is an issue on our side or if these features of the solution are not working very well."
"We have Microsoft and we have the E5 licenses, they have more EDR responses on certain emails. That's something that Cisco ESA on the cloud doesn't have. They don't do anything about MITRE attacks. They only detect if there is a malicious email or a threat and they remove it."
"I use the search all the time. Sometimes, it is hard to search for things and things are hard to find. People come to me all the time, saying, "This email didn't get through." Then, I go searching and don't find it on the first search. You have to think about alternative searches. I don't know if there is an easier way that they could help to find things. I don't know how they could simplify it, because now everybody else is using the cloud and everything is coming from Office 365, or whatever. It is just not the same environment from years ago where everybody had their own server and you could search easier."
"The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky."
"The solution could improve by adding DomainKeys (DKIM) functionality. This is something that is essentially required nowadays for outbound security. They do not have it on their on-premise solution appliance but they have alternate arrangements for their cloud solution."
"There are limited administration controls that should be improved."
"The DMARC security is somewhat weak and could be strengthened."
"Barracuda Email Security Gateway should add auto-remediation to improve the solution. Additionally, there are times when we have false positives and our general emails get locked, we have mentioned this to Barracuda."
"I would like to have better integration with third-party archival vendors to facilitate moving data in and out."
"Solution requires regular checking to ensure it's 'keeping up' with spam."
"The scalability needs improvement, it's the only feature that is required."
"The spam filtering is a little too aggressive. You can not get granular enough to back off on what is considered spam and what is not."
"There needs to be an improvement in integrating the product to work across multiple operating systems, and to have better support for non-Microsoft file types."
"The visibility for the weaknesses in the system and unauthorized access can be improved."
"Too many false positives and lacks an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites."
"The custom alerts have to improve a lot."
"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."
"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."
"They can improve their security in a way where a customer can know if all their attachments are safe or not to open through a report. The solution does its job perfectly, but it never reports to the customer whether those attachments have been stopped before or not."
"We need a separate license and we don't know how to get the license that is required."
More Barracuda Email Security Gateway Pricing and Cost Advice →
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
Barracuda Email Security Gateway is ranked 7th in Email Security with 18 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is ranked 3rd in Email Security with 13 reviews. Barracuda Email Security Gateway is rated 7.8, while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Barracuda Email Security Gateway writes "Instantly blocked and reduced our spam emails ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 writes "Essential security capabilities, plenty of email protection, and enhanced data loss prevention". Barracuda Email Security Gateway is most compared with Fortinet FortiMail, Trend Micro Email Security, Proofpoint Email Protection, Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade and Fortinet FortiMail Cloud, whereas Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Mimecast Email Security with Targeted Threat Protection, Fortinet FortiMail, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection and FireEye Email Security. See our Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 report.
See our list of best Email Security vendors.
We monitor all Email Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
