Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Barracuda Email Protection vs Barracuda Message Archiver 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

Barracuda Email Protection
Ranking in Email Archiving
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (10th), Security Incident Response (9th), Office 365 Protection (4th)
Barracuda Message Archiver
Ranking in Email Archiving
10th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Email Archiving category, the mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 15.1%, down from 18.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Barracuda Message Archiver is 4.4%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Archiving Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Barracuda Email Protection15.1%
Barracuda Message Archiver4.4%
Other80.5%
Email Archiving
 

Featured Reviews

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.
reviewer2153010 - PeerSpot reviewer
DP Manager at a agriculture with 51-200 employees
Easy to use and doesn't require any maintenance
It's just a backup for email so that if people delete and/or try to remove stuff they shouldn't, we can find it It's easy to use. It's a little bit more expensive than the others.  It's like anything. You got to log in when you want stuff nowadays. Other than that, it's pretty good. I didn't…

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 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 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."
"The product is easy to deploy and maintain."
"The solution is straightforward to set up."
"Barracuda email protection is stable. I would give it a nine because of its strong cybersecurity features."
"The archiving and search features are very good."
"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 best feature of Barracuda Email Protection is that it provides protection for Microsoft 365."
"It's easy to use."
 

Cons

"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."
"Regarding the price, I find it pretty expensive. It is not even reasonable; it is pretty expensive because we are dealing with the South African market and our currency is not as powerful as the dollar."
"Barracuda Email Protection needs better reporting and more robust integration with security awareness training platforms and third-party solutions."
"Barracuda Essentials can improve by continually adding more features."
"The solution's graphical user interface (GUI) could be improved visually."
"The policies are set up in Barracuda by default; we don't have any control over them."
"The solution's reporting mechanism is a little poor and could be improved."
"Two to three months back, we got fraudulent emails in which someone in the organization was being blamed."
"The user mailbox management is poor."
"It's a little bit more expensive than the others."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is moderate, where it is neither cheap nor expensive."
"The price is similar to that of Microsoft 365."
"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."
"Barracuda licensing model is good."
"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."
"We didn't have to pay a lot for the solution because we got it from a good vendor with a good user volume."
"Price-wise, this product is middle-of-the-road."
"Despite a list price possibly around $40 per user, their market price allows customers to easily buy the solution."
"They're a little bit more expensive than the others."
"We are satisfied with the pricing and the service is bundled so there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Email Archiving solutions are best for your needs.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise7
No data available
 

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Email Protection?
I think the costs of Barracuda Email Protection are acceptable because I am selling another software license for anti-spam, and I have no problem with that product.
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...
What is your primary use case for Barracuda Message Archiver?
We use Barracuda Message Archiver to keep a copy of our users' emails, both inbound or outbound. Our goal in using it is that from a compliance perspective, we can provide access to our auditors. I...
 

Also Known As

Barracuda Essentials, Barracuda Forensics and Incident Response
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ACT Government, Acumen Group, AGIP, Delta Dental Plans Association, Desai/Nasr Consulting Engineers, Inc., Equinox Information Systems
Alfa Romeo, Texas A&M University, Time Warner, Nintendo, Boeing 
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Email Protection vs. Barracuda Message Archiver and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.