We performed a comparison between Barracuda Email Security Gateway and Sophos Email based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Email Security solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails."
"The malicious URL scanning, as well as the anti-malware features, have been really useful for us in our environment."
"It has an intuitive, clear graphical interface where you can deploy your policies and understand the overall flow. There are a lot of things that you cannot handle on the graphic interface, like message filters. For this, you need to go to a lower level where you have more power, like command line interface. So, this solution has the best of both worlds. There are not a lot of bells and whistles. It is more practical with access to most features that you can configure."
"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."
"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."
"I love the Advanced Malware Protection feature. It works very well... The appliance has more security such as SDF, DKIM, DMARC, and encryption."
"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."
"The spam filtering, in particular, is very important for us. We have a large volume of emails each month, something like 200,000, and Barracuda filters about 85 percent of the spam, malware, and phishing that comes in. It prevents our users from receiving this content on their computers."
"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."
"The solution is scalable."
"It catches a lot of things and has the ability to add domains as well as add senders and update their things."
"There are plenty of features, such as sandboxing capabilities with zero threat protection. It has all the leading email security appliances compared to other solutions."
"The product safeguards user mail for gateway defense, data protection, business continuity, AI-based inbox defense, and automated threat detection and incident response."
"The anti-spamming, anti-fishing features are great."
"The most valuable feature of Barracuda Email Security Gateway is that it blocks almost 99 percent of threats from users' email inboxes."
"It's easy to use and the configuration is straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of Sophos Email is the sandbox. We're able to scan the file, isolate it, and look at it before it is delivered. It is highly effective."
"I have found Sophos Email to be scalable."
"When you say email security, it's about everything, incoming email, outgoing email, spam, phishing emails, unwanted marketing emails. You can set rules, but the main feature of Sophos Email is to make sure you don't get hacked. 95% of people who are hacked do not get hacked by typing the router password. They are hacked from the inside out, which means they send you a document that is a zero-day attack, you open it, nothing happens, but technically the attack is running in the background of your computer. This is how they gain access to your PC."
"The speed and stability were fine."
"Sophos Email is a stable solution."
"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."
"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 interface is dated. It has looked pretty much the same for 15 years or so. It would be helpful to be able to do everything from one spot. The centralized quarantine and reporting are completely separate from policy administration."
"The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky."
"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."
"The configuration UI should be made more intuitive. Currently, it takes a while to understand how to do the basic configurations."
"They can do it better with web links, with the URLs. They have a technology called Outbreak but it doesn't work as well as we would like."
"The Forged Email Detection feature needs improvement, particularly with domain. The sensors are not that good and the rules sets are unclear."
"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."
"There are limited administration controls that should be improved."
"The UI could be a little cleaner and require less clicking around in different modules. They give the illusion of a single pane of glass, but as you click around to different products, you're actually being transferred into a different system."
"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 deep scanning feature needs to be improved."
"The DMARC security is somewhat weak and could be strengthened."
"The solution should include an improvised anti-phishing feature, since it blocks certain genuine emails."
"The scalability needs improvement, it's the only feature that is required."
"Sophos Email can improve mail security."
"Sophos Email can improve security."
"The solution should be able to support the cloud environment."
"The installation of Sophos Email could be easier. It's a bit difficult because setting up the email virtually requires some bit of technical knowledge."
"The security of the solution could improve."
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Barracuda Email Security Gateway is ranked 10th in Email Security with 21 reviews while Sophos Email is ranked 23rd in Email Security with 6 reviews. Barracuda Email Security Gateway is rated 7.8, while Sophos Email is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Barracuda Email Security Gateway writes "Instantly blocked and reduced our spam emails ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos Email writes "Effective on-premises and cloud, beneficial sandboxing, and advanced AI detection". Barracuda Email Security Gateway is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Fortinet FortiMail, Trend Micro Email Security, Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade and Barracuda Sentinel, whereas Sophos Email is most compared with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Fortinet FortiMail, Proofpoint Email Protection and Symantec Messaging Gateway. See our Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs. Sophos Email report.
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