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 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."
"Customer support is the solution's strongest point."
"This product is powerful and quite simple to use."
"Great at blocking spam."
"It's easy to use. The configuration and web interface are user-friendly."
"We find the product to be scalable."
"The performance is good."
"The anti-spamming, anti-fishing features are great."
"Defender helps us prioritize threats across our organization."
"At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable features are safe attachments and safe links."
"I like its investigation capabilities, as that is what is most important to me. It is fairly simple with a user-friendly interface."
"The initial setup is straightforward. You just add the license, click it, and then you can set up the rules. It is quite simple."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 helps people to work remotely. It is a secure solution. We don't need to use our company's computers or get VPN connections to the networks. I can control how they share screens and what they send to the devices. It keeps our organizations confidential and sensitive information safe."
"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."
"The benefit that stands out to me is the ability for multiple individuals to collaborate simultaneously within the same document. Additionally, there is the option to save the document directly in the integrated OneDrive or SharePoint."
"Barracuda's spam database isn't on par with its competitors. Users complain about the spam email they're receiving, and we report the issue. Barracuda said they are going to update their system to block the malicious email we received, but we're still getting the same spam. The signatures are not in their database. They need to update their spam signatures because spam is bypassing Barracuda."
"Barracuda should add an option where it can add multiple domains, such as abc.com, bbc.com, and cbc.com. Therefore, this domains' emails will be allowed and other domains' emails will not be relayed through Barracuda Email Security Gateway. Whereas, if you allow the IP address, then any of the domain's emails will be relayed through Barracuda Email Security Gateway. That is the drawback that I have observed. So, Barracuda should work on this."
"I am not aware of the licensing costs."
"Artificial intelligence improvement could be used to help block spam and phishing mail that is directly delivered to users."
"We still have critical threats coming into our environment and delivered to our users. When we compare it with other solutions, these other solutions can already detect those threats."
"Its integration with other solutions can be improved. There should be integration for telemetry information, system information, and other types of information with other solutions. Barracuda currently doesn't have that. Barracuda has its own platform. Its integration with firewalls is quite good, and it communicates really well with firewalls, but I have not seen any other integration. Based on what I know, it does have an API at the backend, but I have not used it."
"The reports are standard, and it would be nice to be able to customize them."
"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."
"Microsoft sometimes has downtime, and we'll get several incidents coming in back to back. We have a huge backlog of notifications, many of which may be false positives. However, there might be serious alerts, so we can't risk dismissing all of them at once."
"The only thing they should improve is the licensing model. They should stop changing it. A year ago, the five features I mentioned were included in one product. Now, three of them are bundled into one product, and you have to pay extra for the other two. I don't mind paying extra, but I don't want them to change it every year or every six months. I need to know what I'm looking at and not worry about it next year."
"One area for improvement is support, in terms of being able to reach them and, especially, technical support for configuration."
"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."
"In one of the reports I can get the exact place where a vulnerable file resides. But for that, I need to explicitly go into the device and check. If they could include that file part in the report, without my having to go to the device itself, that would help."
"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."
"There's room for improvement regarding the time frame for retrieving emails."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 must improve the overall management style, including the GUI. It also needs to change the filters so that it is easy to whitelist and blacklist data."
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Barracuda Email Security Gateway is ranked 2nd in SEG (Secure Email Gateway) with 51 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is ranked 1st in Email Security with 41 reviews. Barracuda Email Security Gateway is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Barracuda Email Security Gateway writes "Robust email protection with advanced features such as effective spam filtering, virus and malware defense, phishing protection and high scalability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 writes "Allows for easy reporting of problems, valuable anti-phishing, and anti-malware support". Barracuda Email Security Gateway is most compared with Fortinet FortiMail, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Proofpoint Email Protection, Cisco Secure Email and Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade, whereas Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Mimecast Email Security, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Cisco Secure Email and Microsoft Defender for Business. See our Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 report.
We monitor all SEG (Secure Email Gateway) 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.