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AppRiver Email Archiving vs Barracuda Email Protection comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 19, 2026

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

AppRiver Email Archiving
Ranking in Email Archiving
11th
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Barracuda Email Protection
Ranking in Email Archiving
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (9th), Security Incident Response (9th), Office 365 Protection (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Email Archiving category, the mindshare of AppRiver Email Archiving is 2.3%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 9.9%, down from 21.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Archiving Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Barracuda Email Protection9.9%
AppRiver Email Archiving2.3%
Other87.8%
Email Archiving
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1888686 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at a financial services firm with 1-10 employees
Great for email archiving, good search functionality, and bug-free
The deployment was very simple. It was backed into the Global Relay host exchange. We're using it through a company called Global Relay and it's on their server. The deployment is instantaneous. It's across all the emails under the domain. You only need one person to implement it. The product does not require any maintenance.
Xavie Simons - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Development Manager at Procter & Gamble
Improved email security has reduced spam, simplified encrypted mail, and strengthened user trust
The best features Barracuda Email Protection offers include good spam filtering and very good sandboxing of all links, as well as good encryption. It also has integrated logging for user management of their own spam. It has better filtering technology, so few are false positives as well, with excellent anti-spam engines and logging. It is extremely easy to install, configure, and set up, and there is excellent message tracking for folks that say they have not received an email they were expecting. Integrated logging and user management make my daily work easier because it is very easy to log in and to manage this tool, hence making it a very good tool for email protection. It also has excellent, easy-to-add designated users as site administrators, and it is competitively priced. It has a user-friendly portal, strong cloud-based features, and no additional maintenance cost, along with responsive support. Barracuda Email Protection has positively impacted my organization by handling encryption better than any other tool I have used before, which has increased our email protection significantly. Our security has also increased from forty percent to sixty-five percent, especially when dealing with all the threats that come through emails. It has been a great tool because we can handle email delays and delays on file scanning. When our partners are happy, we are very happy, and it has helped us have less time chasing bad emails. The fast implementation of encrypted mail keeps employees working with less interruption since they are happy, satisfied, and secure.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The security aspect and the search feature are the best features."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Barracuda Email Protection are flexibility and customization."
"When we got the service, it included the email archiver with unlimited storage."
"At the moment, I am working with Sophos Cloud, Sophos Intercept X; when they introduced the XDR, we used it, and then when they introduced the Optix, we used it, and then we upgraded our subscription with them to MDR, so we are now utilizing Sophos Cloud Central MDR."
"Barracuda Email Protection has positively impacted my organization by increasing our email protection and security significantly, with our security increasing from forty percent to sixty-five percent, especially when dealing with all the threats that come through emails."
"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 helpful aspect for me is the out-of-the-box configuration, which is fairly good."
"Barracuda email protection is stable. I would give it a nine because of its strong cybersecurity features."
 

Cons

"We'd like there to be an app whereby we could access the solution."
"The product must enable bulk user management."
"I would like to see some additional functionality in terms of employee monitoring, as part of a work-from-home security solution."
"They could simplify the licensing and the pricing."
"The policies are set up in Barracuda by default; we don't have any control over them."
"The email encryption could be improved."
"The technology works on a supervised engine, but it would be better if it ran on an unsupervised engine."
"Regarding the threat protection feature in Barracuda Email Protection, it does not help to manage threats or sophisticated threats."
"The customer service and support could be improved if the support were available directly in Europe. Currently, the support is often managed from India, so we sometimes need to wait due to the time zone difference. It would be quicker and better if the support were provided by European staff."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The price is similar to that of Microsoft 365."
"Price-wise, this product is middle-of-the-road."
"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."
"Barracuda licensing model is good."
"Despite a list price possibly around $40 per user, their market price allows customers to easily buy the solution."
"The price of Barracuda Essentials is better than some of the competing products."
"The solution's pricing is moderate, where it is neither cheap nor expensive."
"We didn't have to pay a lot for the solution because we got it from a good vendor with a good user volume."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

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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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Email Protection?
I would say the price for Barracuda Email Protection is very nice; the solution is not expensive.
What needs improvement with Barracuda Email Protection?
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 se...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Barracuda Essentials, Barracuda Forensics and Incident Response
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Smith Electric and Associates
ACT Government, Acumen Group, AGIP, Delta Dental Plans Association, Desai/Nasr Consulting Engineers, Inc., Equinox Information Systems
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Mimecast, Barracuda Networks and others in Email Archiving. Updated: July 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.