Barracuda Email Protection vs Cisco Secure Email comparison

Barracuda Networks and Cisco are both solutions in the Email Security category. Barracuda Networks is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.7, while Cisco is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.1. Barracuda Networks holds a 3.3% mindshare in Email Security, compared to Cisco’s 5.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Barracuda Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

Barracuda Email Protection

Read 18 Barracuda Email Protection reviews

2,608 Views
2,217 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco Secure Email

Read 62 Cisco Secure Email reviews

8,156 Views
7,014 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Barracuda Email Protection

Cisco Secure Email

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

Cisco Secure Email and Barracuda Email Protection compete in the email security category. While Cisco excels with robust security for larger enterprises, Barracuda appeals to smaller businesses with cost-effective solutions and ease of use.

Features: Cisco Secure Email integrates smoothly with existing networks, offering advanced threat protection, filtering capabilities, and policy customizations to block spam, viruses, and malware. On the other hand, Barracuda Email Protection is known for its ease of use and strong integration with Microsoft 365, providing essential protection features at an affordable rate for smaller setups.

Room for Improvement: Cisco Secure Email would benefit from improving its management interfaces and cloud service integrations to address ease-of-use concerns, particularly for smaller organizations. Conversely, Barracuda needs to enhance its reporting functionalities and expand integration options beyond Microsoft 365 while strengthening fraud detection capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco offers on-premises and hybrid cloud deployment, providing flexibility based on needs, although initial setup can be complex. Its customer service is well-regarded. Barracuda focuses on public cloud deployment, which is simpler and favored by less technical users, though some experience inconsistency in support.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco Secure Email involves higher costs, justified by extensive security features, providing a positive ROI by preventing costly breaches. Barracuda's pricing strategy is budget-friendly, appealing to smaller businesses by offering core protection at a lower total cost of ownership.

To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda Email Protection vs. Cisco Secure Email Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda Email Protection vs. Cisco Secure Email

December 2025

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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

Barracuda Email Protection

Ranking in Email Security

13th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Email Archiving (2nd), Office 365 Protection (4th)

Cisco Secure Email

Ranking in Email Security

5th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cisco Security Portfolio (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 3.3%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Email is 5.2%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Email Security Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Cisco Secure Email	5.2%
Barracuda Email Protection	3.3%
Other	91.5%

Email Security

Featured Reviews

LeeMiles

Director, Information Technology at St Albans High School For Girls

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.

Read full review

Basil-Dange

Chief Information Security Officer at Abcl

Threat intelligence with fast attack detection enables comprehensive email protection

In some cases, detection is missed, leading to false positives where genuine emails are flagged as spam. This could result in users not opening genuine emails. We have highlighted this to Cisco because sometimes phishing or marketing campaigns, which are genuine, are incorrectly flagged as spam. The solution should better analyze the actual content rather than only focusing on the email header or origin.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of Barracuda Email Protection are flexibility and customization."

"The beauty of Barracuda Email Protection is that it is easy to manage and simple to deploy."

"We check the reports sometimes to see that frequent attacks and malicious emails are being blocked by the solution."

"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."

"I'm quite satisfied with the graphical user interface for Barracuda products."

"The most helpful aspect for me is the out-of-the-box configuration, which is fairly good."

"The best feature of Barracuda Email Protection is that it provides protection for Microsoft 365."

"I would rate the solution nine out of ten."

More Barracuda Email Protection pros

"There are a lot of filters for scam emails and things like that work out of the box. You can also use the antivirus features. I like its features."

"Anti-Spam and Advanced Malware Protection are the most valuable features... and we also have the option to block Zero-day attacks."

"Cisco Secure Email's most valuable is email certification."

"We like the in-built features, like the email filtering based on the IP and domain. Cisco has its own blacklisted domains and IPs, which is very good. This filters around 70 percent of emails from spam, and we are seeing fewer false positives with this."

"My favorite feature of Cisco Secure Email is the threat intelligence capabilities, particularly its integration with Cisco Talos."

"Because we scan products, and there is a lot of critical data, security is very important in these cases."

"The tool has a DLP solution which we can implement. Its database is updated regularly."

"It sends us reports, where we can see if there have been attacks, e.g. DDoS. If so, we can switch to a clean IP."

More Cisco Secure Email pros

Cons

"Sometimes it is somewhat laggy, especially on the Archiver side. It should have improved performance on their Message Archiver."

"Barracuda Essentials can improve by continually adding more features."

"There is room for improvement, particularly in reaching out to technical support during deployment."

"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."

"They could simplify the licensing and the pricing."

"The solution's reporting mechanism is a little poor and could be improved."

"The platform's pricing needs improvement."

"I would like to see better integration with other products."

More Barracuda Email Protection cons

"Better dashboards and more interactive overviews would be nice, but the current functionality is sufficient."

"The user interface is a bit complex."

"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 management features of the product are not up to date."

"The solution needs to improve its advanced phishing filters. It is very good at filtering things which have bad reputations. However, when phishing or malicious emails are new or coming from a legitimate source, we don't feel that the solution is working."

"The configuration UI should be made more intuitive. Currently, it takes a while to understand how to do the basic configurations."

"It is not user-friendly, and it is quite complicated. So, it should be more user-friendly."

"Typically, in a phishing email, they try to use a name everybody's going to recognize, like the CEO's name or the CFO's name... With this appliance, the way it's designed at the moment, for us to really stop that with any level of confidence, we have to build a dictionary of all the names of the people we want it to check, and all the ways they could be spelled. My name would be in there as Phillip Collins, Phillip D. Collins, Phillip Dean Collins, Phil Collins, Phil D. Collins. There could be eight or 10 variations of my name that we'd have to put in the dictionary. There's no artificial intelligence to say "Phil Collins" could be all these other things, and to stop phishing from coming through in that way."

More Cisco Secure Email cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price-wise, this product is middle-of-the-road."

"The product is expensive."

"Barracuda licensing model is good."

"The price is similar to that of Microsoft 365."

"The price of Barracuda Essentials is better than some of the competing products."

"Despite a list price possibly around $40 per user, their market price allows customers to easily buy the solution."

"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 solution's pricing is moderate, where it is neither cheap nor expensive."

More Barracuda Email Protection pricing and cost advice

"It is a relatively expensive option compared to other alternatives."

"The pricing for the Cisco Email Security Appliance involves recurring costs for licenses based on the contracted time frame, such as one year, three years, or five years. Renewals are required after the license expires."

"It is a super big router that costs a few hundred thousand dollars."

"We were using Proofpoint and then we switched to Cisco... reportability was one of the main reasons we switched, but the biggest one was cost. If you can get an equivalent functionality for a better price it's wise to do so. That's what our primary decision came down to: We could get equivalent functionality at a lower price point."

"In addition to the standard licensing, there is a cost for SMARTnet as well."

"The product's price falls on the higher side when compared to the other products on the market."

"I rate the product price as six on a scale of one to ten, where one means it is a very expensive tool."

"The price is significantly high."

More Cisco Secure Email pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	18
Large Enterprise	25

Questions from the Community

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 tool.

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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 a list price possibly around $40 per user, their market price allows customers t...

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What needs improvement with Barracuda Email Protection?

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Email?

Cisco Secure Email is a budget-friendly solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Email?

The pricing structure is good as it is user-based or email client-based, which is positive for clients.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Email?

The user interface of the Email Security Gateway ( /products/security-gateway-reviews ) should be improved. It would be beneficial to have the functionality of the Email Threat Defense integrated i...

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Comparisons

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs Barracuda Email Protection

Compared 25% of the time

Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration vs Barracuda Email Protection

Compared 21% of the time

Mimecast Email Security vs Barracuda Email Protection

Compared 10% of the time

Proofpoint Email Protection vs Barracuda Email Protection

Compared 6% of the time

Perception Point Advanced Email Security vs Barracuda Email Protection

Compared 2% of the time

More Barracuda Email Protection Competitors

Trellix Collaboration Security vs Cisco Secure Email

Compared 25% of the time

Fortinet FortiMail vs Cisco Secure Email

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 vs Cisco Secure Email

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) vs Cisco Secure Email

Compared 8% of the time

Proofpoint Email Protection vs Cisco Secure Email

Compared 6% of the time

More Cisco Secure Email Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda Email Protection

December 2025

Download Barracuda Email Protection product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Email

December 2025

Download Cisco Secure Email product report

Also Known As

Barracuda Essentials

Cisco Email Security, IronPort, Cisco Email Security, ESA, Email Security Appliances

Overview

The popularity of Microsoft 365 means criminals test and design their attacks to bypass its native security features. And that means you need additional layers of defense. With Advanced Threat Protection enabled, Barracuda uses multiple layers of detection, including signature, static, and behavioral analysis, along with CPU-emulation sandboxing to accurately detect and block zero-hour targeted attacks and ransomware.

Traditional email gateways use static rules and policies—reputation analysis, block lists, and malicious payloads—to determine if an email is malicious.

Barracuda protects your Microsoft 365 inbox against evasive threats with a powerful AI engine that learns the unique communication patterns within your organization through access to internal and historical emails. Once it understands what legitimate emails looks like for each user, it can detect anomalies that signal malicious intent. This context-based detection is more effective at blocking targeted attacks, which are designed to bypass traditional rule-based email security.

Barracuda Networks

Cisco Secure Email provides email security with advanced threat protection, spam filtering, and easy integration with Cisco Talos, ensuring comprehensive protection against cyber threats like phishing and malware.

Cisco Secure Email offers a comprehensive platform for organizations seeking robust email security. With advanced threat protection and seamless integration with Cisco Talos, it enhances threat intelligence. The tool provides easy-to-use spam blocking and granular policy customization. Effective ransomware, phishing, and malware protection ensures stable network performance. It includes logging and reporting features, along with Active Directory integration, delivering enhanced security without extra hardware. Although it addresses threats efficiently, improvements in synchronization with reporting tools and phishing detection are needed. Organizations find cost and licensing complexities challenging for smaller networks and seek more intuitive configuration, advanced AI threat detection, and comprehensive reporting. Enhanced support, documentation, and cross-platform compatibility are desirable for better management and scalability.

What are the most important features?

Advanced Threat Protection: Guards against cyber threats like malware and phishing
Spam Blocking: Efficiently filters unwanted emails to maintain inbox integrity
Policy Customization: Allows granular control over email security policies
Integration with Cisco Talos: Enhances threat intelligence with global insights
Active Directory Integration: Simplifies user management and enhances security

What benefits and ROI should users consider?

Ease of Use: Intuitive interface provides a straightforward user experience
Network Performance: Maintains speed and reliability while securing emails
Comprehensive Reporting: Offers detailed insights into email threats and responses
No Additional Hardware: Provides complete email security without hardware costs
Enhanced Email Security: Protects against a wide range of email-based threats

In industries like finance, healthcare, and IT, Cisco Secure Email is key to securing email communications. It serves as the primary email gateway in datacenters, scanning and filtering emails to defend against phishing, malware, and spam. Many organizations integrate it with Sophos Antivirus and Talos Threat Intelligence for heightened protection. It plays a crucial role in outbound message control and data loss prevention, ensuring compliance with security policies.

Cisco

Sample Customers

ACT Government, Acumen Group, AGIP, Delta Dental Plans Association, Desai/Nasr Consulting Engineers, Inc., Equinox Information Systems

SUNY Old Westbury, CoxHealth, City of Fullerton, Indra

Buyer's Guide

Barracuda Email Protection vs. Cisco Secure Email

December 2025

Free Report: Barracuda Email Protection vs. Cisco Secure Email

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