Barracuda Email Security Gateway Reviews

Barracuda Email Security Gateway is a good product, though it is a bit expensive. Barracuda Email Security Gateway's AI and threat detection methods are good, though the product doesn't provide much archiving features. I even recommend Barracuda Email Security Gateway to others, and if I have money, I will go for it, but when I am running a business, I need to look at what is good for business and make profits.

The downsides of the solution stem from the fact that it is an expensive product, and one may see too many false positives when using it, making them both areas where improvements are required.

I have been using Barracuda Email Security Gateway for three years.

It is a very stable solution.

In terms of scalability, I can say it is an okay solution. Barracuda Email Security Gateway offers good AI functionalities, but sometimes, in my company, we have seen a lot of false positives with the product.

I have experience interacting with the technical support team of Barracuda Email Security Gateway, and in my opinion, they are very efficient. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have previous experience with Fortinet. I decided to move from Fortinet to Barracuda since the latter provides me with the AI functionalities I need. My company tried the trial version offered by Barracuda, which is expensive, so we decided to look at Libraesva, which is an affordable product that has the AI functionalities I need. I think Libraesva is the best product in the market right now based on my experience and the product I currently use in my company.

The initial setup of the product was straightforward.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in half a day.

Barracuda Email Security Gateway is a bit expensive or costly product. I rate the price of Barracuda Email Security Gateway a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price.

During the evaluation process in my company, we considered Clearswift against Barracuda Email Security Gateway. My company found out that Clearswift also lacks AI functionalities, just like Fortinet, so we decided not to work with it.

With Barracuda Email Security Gateway, I feel that its AI functionalities are good, but there were too many false positives. Now I understand that it's more about hardfail than softfail, so you need to understand that certain configurations are not done properly. Even though certain emails don't pass the security check and Barracuda blocks it, it may get through and cause a bit of difficulty for the company.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

Our customers use this solution for screening.

Customer support is the solution's strongest point.

Some customers experience issues with integration.

Our organization has integrated this solution for the last six years.

I rate the stability an eight out of ten.

We have 12 customers using the solution.

I used the support ticket and the response was perfect.

Positive

Our engineer manages the implementation and maintenance.

The solution's pricing is exceedingly high, and it continues to increase. Many-a-time, customers do not renew the solution due to the high price. I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten.

Overall, I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Barracuda protects you from spam and email-based threats like phishing. It also provides backup and web security. We have around 600 users.

My current company had no product before Barracuda. We get a lot of added value from the various things it does, ranging from advanced threat protection and spam filtering to protection from viruses and email spoofing. It also features cloud-to-cloud backup.

The feature that sets Barracuda apart from other solutions is the Office 365 cloud-to-cloud backup.

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.

I've never seen Barracuda go down. It seems like a highly stable product.

Barracuda is fully scalable. It's an enterprise solution that can handle a few hundred boxes to millions.

Over the past decade and a half, I have used various products. I worked with Mimecast, targeted threat protection for seven of the last 12 years, and used ATP for four of the previous seven.

In the last 12 months, I went to Barracuda because they have an online backup system for our Office 365 tenant as an add-on. It's a package that you get with spam protection, and it's cost-effective. Barracuda offers a suite of services similar to what Mimecast includes and backup retention, which is crucial for the Office 365 environment.

Setting up Barracuda is straightforward. I usually pay a nominal fee for their deployment services, and they help us get off the ground. You can deploy in under two hours. I got deployment included for free, but I think it's normally something like $2,500 or something. My entire team is three people, so it doesn't take a lot of effort to maintain.

We're paying around $49,000 for a year for 600 users.

I rate Barracuda Email Security Gateway as a solid nine out of 10. Their spam protection is excellent, but the UI could be better. Their ATP and threat protections are great. I would give them a 10, but the UI requires just enough extra clicks to annoy me.

When you're setting up Barracuda, make sure you're asking all the right questions about setting up your DMARC and DKIM. You need to plan to take advantage of the whole product instead of a small portion of it.

The solution is the first security layer for emails that come into our network, and we use it to filter all spam, phishing emails, and malware that come in via email.

We are now using the virtual appliance in our VMware environment.

In the past, we had a lot of problems from threats and malware that came into our network, directly from email. Users would receive the content and click on a malicious link or open a malicious attachment, and that caused us a lot of problems.

By choosing Barracuda as our solution for filtering, year by year we have seen a big improvement in our environment with a significant reduction in the number of threats. Consequently, we have fewer problems with users. In the past, users who clicked on this malicious content had to stop work for a long period while our support team helped them. We have almost 600 employees, and every month we had a lot of problems with that. Today we have good security maturity using this solution. It has reduced the risk in our environment. Employees lose less time due to malicious content on their computers. Barracuda has helped to secure the gateway.

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.

We have been using Barracuda Email Security Gateway for 15 years.

In our environment today, the stability is good.

The problems we have at times are not about the performance or availability, but about the quality of the detection for some threats. The model that we have does not have a sandbox resource, which other versions Barracuda offer. Sometimes we receive a phishing email that has a malicious link, for example. Even though it is an old threat, Barracuda can't detect it. Sometimes these messages are delivered to our users. This is a gap that we have identified.

Because we use the on-premises version, we don't have many options when it comes to scalability. But in our headquarters, we have the same solution working at the same time in two different data centers for availability.

We have plans to update to the next version, preferably the cloud version, where we can have more options for using the other resources and layers that Barracuda offers. We don't have access to those today on the version we have.

Everyone that I have contacted in their technical support is a professional. They always respond quickly and are very patient, for all the problems we have raised. The technical support really is very good. And today, that makes a real difference. Barracuda is a North American company, but they have support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We are in a different time zone, but we always get support quickly.

Positive

In addition to Barracuda, we used an open-source solution from Linux.

It's not so hard to deploy. Barracuda has a huge forum on the internet with a lot of simple guides to follow. In our case, it was very simple to deploy the solution. Obviously, you need to have some knowledge about your network and the protocols, but every time that we need to use support they are always available very quickly to help us. But overall, the deployment is very simple.

The first time we deployed it, it took about three hours.

Ahead of deployment, we had some meetings with our IT team at our headquarters in Germany because we needed to create some rules in our network in Germany as well as here in Brazil. We chose the best resources for virtualization in our environment. We needed to design exactly how it would work: how Barracuda would receive emails and how we would address emails from our Microsoft Exchange before they went to Barracuda. We always used the Barracuda guidelines in the deployment process.

For our 600 users we have two people involved in the solution, a security guy and a network guy.

If we didn't have a solution like Barracuda in our environment, we would probably have a lot of problems that would directly impact our business. There would be employees who wouldn't be able to work because their machines were infected by threats after they opened email. If we calculate how many users used to be impacted in a year, and how much each one cost the company when not able to work, it would not be a good result. 

With this solution, we can prevent users and their work from being impacted and, consequently, reduce the impact to our business.

Barracuda has the best price. Every year we need to renew our license, and every year I need to compare Barracuda to two or three other players in the market. Barracuda always has a price that is 30 to 40 percent less than the other players' prices.

Last year we paid for the possibility of changing our hardware every three years. But now, because we changed the licensing model to a virtualization model, we don't need that. We just pay for the product and the support. There are two separate costs.

Over the last two years, I have looked at other solutions that might give us more ability to handle new threats. For example, I have looked at solutions that have a sandbox feature integrated into them. But, Barracuda has given us a good idea of what it proposes to do. They already have the solution that I am looking for, but because of costs, we haven't been able to deploy it.

The advantage of Barracuda is its availability. Barracuda provides really good performance and is able to handle tons of emails by the minute and by the hour. The con is that 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.

Barracuda's technology is the kind of technology that gives us a good balance among security, value, and user experience. It is not the best tool or technology on the market, but it does what it was developed to do. There are other possibilities, if you are willing to pay more. But Barracuda is the right solution for the problem in our environment.

A lot of companies pay for a good and comprehensive solution, but they usually only use 50 or 60 percent of what the solution offers. Barracuda is different. We use it 100 percent. I know what the Barracuda technology delivers for me and the value I get from it for what I pay and how I use it. It is that simple.

All our Office 365 emails will first go through Barracuda. It checks for any EXEs and the like, checking the email contents to allow or stop those. We also use the solution for archiving and backups.

From a security point of view, Barracuda Email Security improved our mail environment. Other than that, its backups are valuable.

The dashboard's UI could be improved to make changes to the blocklist. We currently have to go into the mail and check the list and the dashboard, and it would be better if we could directly block particular domains or emails instead.

I've used this solution for almost four years.

Barracuda has been stable till now.

We have 100 users using Barracuda Email Security Gateway.

Barracuda's technical support is fine.

We used to have FortiMail, and we migrated to Barracuda. Barracuda is much more effective than FortiMail. Barracuda handles spam better.

An integrator handled the initial setup.

We find the solution's pricing okay.

Our management wants to migrate to E5 from E3 and says we don't need Barracuda Email Security. However, we are unsure if E5 will have the same features as Barracuda.

I recommend Barracuda, and from a security point of view, I would rate it a nine out of ten. It didn't let any EXEs or phishing emails through.

Our primary use case for this solution is spam filtering. It extracts messaging for us. Thanks to Barracuda Email Security Gateway, I have seen increases in productivity and functionality in terms of spam reduction and filtering against different threats, which is a benefit by default.

The things I find valuable are how it is easy to maintain and its seamlessness. I cannot say it's better or worse than any other solution, but I have no issues with it as it does what it needs to do.

I have noticed that it takes a little time to get familiar with after deploying and some tweaks need to be done as things come up.

I have been using this solution for three years.

We've had a couple of issues pop up over the three years but they were resolved within 15 minutes. One issue that wasn't critical took around a day to resolve.

I would rate the scalability of this solution a 10, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. Currently, there are about 175 users of this solution in our company.

I would say that their customer service is quite good. You will always be able to get someone on the line whenever you call. 

I would say the initial setup was super simple and quick. It takes a couple of hours to deploy. After that, you're up and running. 

I would say that this solution is more expensive than the competitors.

I would rate this solution a 10, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best. Barracuda Email Security Gateway has been fine for our use case.

We primarily use the solution for email security.

The solution is largely stable. 

It can scale. 

Overall, it has been working fine without issue. 

The message tracking and messaging logs have proven to be quite useful. 

The initial setup can be a little bit complex.

When we implemented Barracuda three years back, although the deployment went smoothly, we also needed to implement some changes regarding the configuration, which were affecting the stamp control rate. Some options were not so easy to remember and we had to search for directions.

For example, if I want to change the mail flow settings, there are two different options available in Barracuda. If I apply a change on one option and didn't change the configuration on the other option, the mail flow doesn't work. Yet the second option is always hidden. I always need to search for it when I need to change some mail flow settings.

I've used the solution for more than three years. 

The product is stable. Sometimes some spamming issues occur, however, we manage to control those after making some changes.

We have a model that supports 5,000 users. We currently have 3,500 users. We have room to scale. 

The solution does work fine with a large number of users. 

I administer the solution and provide troubleshooting and issue resolution as required. The support from Barracuda is pretty good overall when I reach out. 

Neutral

I have an experience with Barracuda Email Security, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Defender.

The initial setup and implementation process is complex. It is not exactly easy.

I'd rate it 2.5 out of five in terms of ease of setup.

The pricing is moderate. It was neither cheap nor expensive. 

I'd rate the cost 3.5 out of five in terms of affordability.

We're a Barracuda customer.

We are using virtual appliances, not the cloud version of the solution. That said, we do plan to move to the cloud. 

While we are not planning to change Barracuda, we are planning to improve Barracuda after purchasing the cloud solution. Our plan is to enhance our email security when we integrate our appliance with the Barracuda Cloud solution.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. Some of the exposed emails were not blocked by our Barracuda clients. Although we have engaged the principal, and they helped troubleshoot and tweak some configurations, it's still an issue. We still face some exposed emails delivered to our management level.

I'd advise potential new users that if they plan to implement Barracuda, they should find someone knowledgeable in implementations. They need someone who will follow best practices and understand procedures laid out in the documentation. After configuration and implementation, there may still be some fine-tuning required. 

Barracuda is similar to FortiMail. There is a cloud component that acts like a sandbox. The email enters, and you can open a suspicious attachment to see if it's malicious. If you find that it's malicious, you can block it and send it to Barracuda's on-prem device.

The on-prem device looks for other details like URLs and particular types of content. If everything looks okay, it's forwarded to the SMTP server and the user. We have around 20 to 30 users.

I like Barracuda's cloud sandbox feature. 

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.

I have been working with Barracuda for almost three years.

Barracuda is quite stable.

Barracuda scales as well as FortiMail. You can scale up based on the number of users per box and the email receiver.

Barracuda provides solid support, but they have a different model. They open the terminal, check the issue, and then tell us the problem. 

Barracuda is just like Kaspersky or FortiMail. The initial setup is seamless. They provide the box, and we must mount and configure it according to the customer's environment. It takes about a day or a half-day if you're familiar with the Barracuda environment.

I can easily configure it because it's so typical. When I configure any box, I go over the features. For example, I will first configure the SMTP server if I want to create an inbound flow. I look for that feature and configure it. The fundamentals don't vary much between devices. Some options might be different, or the features may have another name. There may be some additional features that FortiMail has, but Barracuda doe not. It varies from device to device, but the basic configuration is the same.

I rate Barracuda Email Security Gateway six out of 10. Based on my experience, we are recommending FortiMail or Barracuda because we find these two solutions the most stable. FortiMail has fewer issues with spam.