Barracuda Email Protection vs Fortinet FortiMail comparison

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12,858 views|10,247 comparisons
97% willing to recommend
Barracuda Networks Logo
1,455 views|1,180 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Fortinet Logo
6,822 views|4,504 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Barracuda Email Protection and Fortinet FortiMail 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.
To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda Email Protection vs. Fortinet FortiMail Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,246 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Defender for 365 is a comprehensive cloud-based solution. The value of the cloud is that you aren't alone. Threat intelligence and analytics are shared in the cloud. We don't have to find the solution alone. If you face an unknown threat with traditional solutions like Trend Micro and Symantec, you need to open a case and send your information to them to analyze forensically and identify the source of the attack.""The product's scalability is good.""The technical support is good and quick to resolve issues.""Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable feature is its performance.""Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a stable solution.""At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us.""It also gives me good visibility because, with Defender, I'm using a Microsoft product to defend Microsoft products. The integration was really seamless and I have wide visibility because it picks up almost everything. Literally, I can see almost every activity that happens, from the e-mail to the workstation itself.""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."

More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pros →

"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.""The most valuable features of Barracuda Essentials are it's a trusted name and is rated very high on review sites. It blocks high percentages of spam and junk email and it's in the cloud. They have hardware appliances, but this is in the cloud. The solution is very effective at blocking malware and blocking spam and this is what we are looking for. There's not a whole lot of complexity, you want a solution that is very good at blocking out all of the unwanted emails.""Barracuda email protection is stable. I would give it a nine because of its strong cybersecurity features.""The most valuable features of Barracuda Email Protection are flexibility and customization.""The solution is straightforward to set up.""The product is easy to deploy and maintain.""The most valuable features are security and ease of use.""The most valuable aspect includes attempts to spoof or compromise domains from external sources."

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"The solution is very, very stable.""The most valuable feature of the solution is its interface, allowing users to get around the solution easily. The integration capabilities in the solution are also very easy.""The most valuable features are the endpoint defense features, it is very secure.""This solution is good for small and medium enterprise companies.""Technical support is great. They are able to look at their patches and offer quick responses. We even have an account manager in the Middle East. They are very good.""A full-featured email gateway solution that contains security threats reliably.""The most valuable feature of the solution is the tool's ability to prevent phishing attacks.""FortiMail possesses notable strengths, and one key feature is its store-and-forward concept."

More Fortinet FortiMail Pros →

Cons
"About eight months ago, we started to measure the quantity of phishing and spam that we have been receiving, and it has been increasing a lot. That means that protection for our email is not as good as we were expecting.""We need to be able to whitelist data at the backend.""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.""We need a separate license and we don't know how to get the license that is required.""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.""One area for improvement is support, in terms of being able to reach them and, especially, technical support for configuration.""The XDR dashboard has room for improvement.""There is room for improvement in terms of reporting."

More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Cons →

"They could simplify the licensing and the pricing.""Sometimes it is somewhat laggy, especially on the Archiver side. It should have improved performance on their Message Archiver.""The policies are set up in Barracuda by default; we don't have any control over them.""I would like to see better integration with other products.""The solution's reporting mechanism is a little poor and could be improved.""I would like to see some additional functionality in terms of employee monitoring, as part of a work-from-home security solution.""The solution's graphical user interface (GUI) could be improved visually.""Barracuda Essentials can improve by continually adding more features."

More Barracuda Email Protection Cons →

"The solution could be improved by providing a virtual machine facility with a complete set of options in the VM setup.""The product could incorporate even more artificial intelligence to enhance the functionality, but it is a competetive and intelligent product as it.""I think the security of the product could improve.""Fortinet FortiMail's technical support team has shortcomings and needs improvement.""There are features that other solutions have that this one is lacking, such as reporting options. I hope in future releases they advance their features list.""Online support sometimes takes up to a week to get back to you.""The logging information is sometimes not clear or easy to understand.""It's difficult for me to talk about areas for improvement in Fortinet FortiMail because I'm the general manager of the company and I'm an engineer with knowledge about the solution, but I'm not deeply involved in its implementation. As I mentioned previously, Fortinet FortiMail is also being used within the company, and I'm happy with its functionality, but sometimes, attacks pass and avoid the Fortinet FortiMail filters, but those could be very sophisticated attacks. There could still be an improvement in the filtering feature of the solution, though the security of Fortinet FortiMail is okay for me because I believe you can't implement one hundred percent security in any solution. The initial setup for the solution also needs improvement. The setup is supposed to be simple, but then the customer starts to complain that some of the false positive emails are reaching quarantine, so my team has to configure it again. There have been instances when Fortinet FortiMail rejects valid emails because some of the service partners of the customer have not been configured accurately, so the system considered valid mails as attacks to be quarantined, so aside from improving the filters, there should also be an improvement in the categorization of emails in the server. My team has to modify the configuration so that valid emails could pass and for Fortinet FortiMail to correctly filter the SPAM traffic. A feature that could be added to Fortinet FortiMail in its next release is advanced AI, so it can analyze and decide accurately on which mail is valid and which mail is SPAM."

More Fortinet FortiMail Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It's a user-base subscription."
  • "From the pricing point of view, like any other product in the market, there is scope for negotiation."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is an add-on to the Office license. Many customers are purchasing this solution."
  • "Microsoft Defender for Office 365 comes with Microsoft Windows. It is free with the operating system."
  • "The solution saves money so we have seen a return on investment."
  • "Defender for 365 comes in various plans and licenses, along with other Microsoft security solutions. Purchasing this kind of package or security bundle gives good value for money, and that's what I recommend."
  • More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The price of Barracuda Essentials is better than some of the competing products."
  • "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."
  • "Price-wise, this product is middle-of-the-road."
  • "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 product is expensive."
  • More Barracuda Email Protection Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The licensing model for this solution is better because it is based on the box and not the number of users."
  • "It is an expensive product."
  • "The annual cost is $55,000."
  • "Pricing is straight-forward and renewable without complicated pricing structures."
  • "Pricing is based on initial license purchase and use volume."
  • "In the future I would like it if there's a possibility to lower the price of the bandwidth and UTM. It is quite expensive."
  • "This is a good solution and value for the money."
  • "If you don't need the full bundle that includes everything, you have options for the small or medium enterprise environments."
  • More Fortinet FortiMail Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Threat Explorer is an invaluable tool for me, and it plays a crucial role in helping me discern the origins of various… more »
    Top Answer:The product must provide better malware detection. The detection algorithms don't perform the way I hope they would.
    Top Answer:FortiMail possesses notable strengths, and one key feature is its store-and-forward concept.
    Top Answer:It could benefit from enhancing its functionality, especially in terms of advanced filtering. Introducing features such… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    MS Defender for Office 365
    Barracuda Essentials
    FortiMail
    Learn More
    Overview

    Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a comprehensive security solution designed to protect organizations against advanced threats in their email, collaboration, and productivity environments. It combines the power of Microsoft's threat intelligence, machine learning, and behavioral analytics to provide real-time protection against phishing, malware, ransomware, and other malicious attacks.

    With Microsoft Defender for Office 365, organizations can safeguard their email communication by detecting and blocking malicious links, attachments, and unsafe email content. It employs advanced anti-phishing capabilities to identify and prevent sophisticated phishing attacks that attempt to steal sensitive information or compromise user credentials.

    This solution also offers robust protection against malware and ransomware. It leverages machine learning algorithms to analyze email attachments and URLs in real-time, identifying and blocking malicious content before it reaches users' inboxes. Additionally, it provides advanced threat-hunting capabilities, allowing security teams to proactively investigate and respond to potential threats.

    Microsoft Defender for Office 365 goes beyond email protection and extends its security features to other collaboration tools like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. It scans files and documents stored in these platforms, ensuring that they are free from malware and other malicious content. It also provides visibility into user activities, helping organizations detect and mitigate insider threats.

    Furthermore, this solution offers rich reporting and analytics capabilities, providing organizations with insights into their security posture and threat landscape. It enables security administrators to monitor and manage security incidents, track trends, and take proactive measures to enhance their overall security posture.

    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.

    As cyber attacks become more sophisticated, it is crucial for email security solutions to offer multi-layered protection. Fortinet's proven email security platform, FortiMail, is a comprehensive multi-layered threat protection solution designed to secure users from the full spectrum of email-based threats, which includes zero-day threats, credential impersonation, spam, phishing, malware, and business email compromise (BEC) attacks.

    Fortinet FortiMail offers a variety of deployment models to best fit your organization’s email security needs. On-premises, private or public cloud, or hybrid email environments can be deployed and managed in-house by your team or managed by Fortinet’s data centers. FortiMail also employs virtual machines that provide robust scalability options and flexible deployment of email security infrastructure.

    Fortinet FortiMail Benefits

    Fortinet FortiMail provides your organization with the following benefits:

    • Eliminate message-based threats by using FortiMail’s advanced inspection capabilities before they can harm your users.
    • Flexible licensing ensures that you don’t have to create a license for each user as you scale your network upwards.

    • Achieve regulatory compliance with sophisticated messaging content archiving, quarantining, and routing tools.
    • Stop spam before it takes over your messaging system and network resources, ensuring that your messaging performance remains optimized.

    Fortinet FortiMail Benefits

    Some of Fortinet FortiMail’s top features include:

    • Spam and malware prevention: FortiMail employs advanced techniques and technologies, such as outbreak protection, impersonation detection, content disarm and reconstruction, and sandbox analysis to provide users with high-performing antispam and antimalware tools designed to prevent unwanted bulk email, ransomware, and other targeted attacks.
    • Powerful data loss prevention: Identity-based email encryption and archiving help prevent the loss of sensitive and important information and ensure that your organization adheres to compliance with corporate and industry regulations.
    • Automatic updates: Receive dynamic updates from the FortiGuard subscription services that automatically upgrade your antispam and antivirus functionality using intelligence gathered by Fortinet's dedicated global threat research team.
    • Seamless integration: Integrations with other Fortinet products and external third-party components enable companies to enhance their security by sharing indicators of compromise (IoCs) across a unified security system.
    • Easy email management: Gain full visibility over real-time email traffic with Fortinet FortiMail’s intuitive dashboards, rich reporting features, centralized quarantine tools, and end-user controls. Control email traffic with the solution’s full mail transfer agent and mail-handling capabilities. The solution’s quick-start setup wizard greatly reduces the complexity of deployment and management.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Fortinet FortiMail stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful anti-virus tool and its robust spam protection capabilities.

    Flamur P., head of security management at Ipko Telecommunications, writes, "Fortinet FortiMail has a lot of valuable features. It works great. It also has an antivirus feature. Support for Fortinet FortiMail was also great when my team wanted to block some geographic IPs, but couldn't figure out how to do it. The support team provided clear communication on how to resolve that issue. Another valuable feature of Fortinet FortiMail is spam filtering which tells you how many spammy emails you've received. Based on my current use cases, I'm happy with Fortinet FortiMail."

    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
    Magromer Cueros y Pieles S.A.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company16%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    Logistics Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Construction Company25%
    Security Firm25%
    Manufacturing Company25%
    Educational Organization13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Construction Company7%
    Real Estate/Law Firm7%
    Healthcare Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider17%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Government14%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization44%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    Government5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business42%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise42%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise51%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business57%
    Midsize Enterprise36%
    Large Enterprise7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business41%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise41%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business45%
    Midsize Enterprise31%
    Large Enterprise24%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise54%
    Large Enterprise28%
    Buyer's Guide
    Barracuda Email Protection vs. Fortinet FortiMail
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Email Protection vs. Fortinet FortiMail and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,246 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Barracuda Email Protection is ranked 15th in Email Security with 12 reviews while Fortinet FortiMail is ranked 5th in Email Security with 54 reviews. Barracuda Email Protection is rated 8.8, while Fortinet FortiMail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Barracuda Email Protection writes "Set-it-and-forget-it type of product that doesn't require a lot of management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Fortinet FortiMail writes "Good GUI and configuring security policies is easy but the pricing needs improvement". Barracuda Email Protection is most compared with Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration, TitanHQ SpamTitan, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Abnormal Security and Google Vault, whereas Fortinet FortiMail is most compared with Cisco Secure Email, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Barracuda Email Security Gateway, Fortinet FortiMail Cloud and Proofpoint Email Protection. See our Barracuda Email Protection vs. Fortinet FortiMail 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.