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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
12th
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
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (12th), Security Incident Response (9th), Office 365 Protection (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Email Archiving category, the mindshare of AppRiver Email Archiving is 2.7%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 15.1%, down from 27.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Archiving Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Barracuda Email Protection15.1%
AppRiver Email Archiving2.7%
Other82.2%
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.
Sherif Fouad - PeerSpot reviewer
Group ICT Manager at a mining and metals company with 501-1,000 employees
Have raised concerns about scanning engines and automation while continuing to rely on layered protection strategies
Incident response is something that requires more development from Barracuda's side. Regarding room for improvement for Barracuda Forensics and Incident Response, for the product, developing or improving the scanning engine is important, but it's a bit tricky. I know that they are working on it heavily. The difference between Barracuda and Sophos is Sophos focused heavily on cybersecurity while Barracuda tried to increase their product portfolio. Sometimes, in some cases, this might end up with their teams being unfocused or a bit thin and stretched and super busy. However, there is room for improvement. The product is great. The teams that are supporting are great. But there is always room for improvement. Even if you have a product that you would give a rating of 10 out of 10, there is always room for improvement. The day we stop improving is the day we die. Regarding the scanning engine, Barracuda Forensics and Incident Response has a very good feature where you can create automated flows for how to handle specific emails that are detected as incidents. This needs a bit of an improvement. That's the only component of Barracuda Forensics and Incident Response that I believe requires improvement.

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 archiving and search features are very good."
"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."
"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."
"Barracuda email protection is stable. I would give it a nine because of its strong cybersecurity features."
"The most helpful aspect for me is the out-of-the-box configuration, which is fairly good."
"When we got the service, it included the email archiver with unlimited storage."
"The solution is straightforward to set up."
 

Cons

"We'd like there to be an app whereby we could access the solution."
"Sometimes it is somewhat laggy, especially on the Archiver side. It should have improved performance on their Message Archiver."
"The solution's reporting mechanism is a little poor and could be improved."
"I would like to see better integration with other products."
"The technology works on a supervised engine, but it would be better if it ran on an unsupervised engine."
"Two to three months back, we got fraudulent emails in which someone in the organization was being blamed."
"They could simplify the licensing and the pricing."
"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."
"I would like to see some additional functionality in terms of employee monitoring, as part of a work-from-home security solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Barracuda licensing model is good."
"We didn't have to pay a lot for the solution because we got it from a good vendor with a good user volume."
"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."
"The price is similar to that of Microsoft 365."
"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."
"The solution's pricing is moderate, where it is neither cheap nor expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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?
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...
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, Barracuda Networks, Veritas and others in Email Archiving. Updated: January 2026.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.