Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint comparison

Barracuda Networks and Microsoft are both solutions in the Anti-Malware Tools category. Additionally, 100% of Barracuda Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Barracuda Email Threat Scan...

Read 3 Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] reviews

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Defender for Endp...

Read 210 Microsoft Defender for Endpoint reviews

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7,628 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Barracuda Email Threat Scan...

Microsoft Defender for Endp...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 19, 2026

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] are complementary products catering to distinct security domains, with Defender excelling in endpoint security and Barracuda in email threat detection. Features: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint provides robust integration with Microsoft products, advanced threat intelligence, and automated investigation responses. Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] is effective at identifying hidden email threats, analyzing potential email risks, and offering detailed threat evaluations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint benefits from seamless deployment in Microsoft environments and broad support structures. Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] offers straightforward deployment in email security contexts with focused customer guidance.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Defender for Endpoint offers cost-efficient solutions, particularly advantageous for enterprises using multiple Microsoft services, delivering high ROI through its extensive capabilities. Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] involves investment in specific services but provides substantial value with precise email threat detection, ideal for targeted security objectives.

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January 2026

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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 Threat Scan...

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Defender for Endp...

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

210

Ranking in other categories

Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (2nd), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (3rd), Anti-Malware Tools (1st), Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (3rd), Microsoft Security Suite (3rd)

Featured Reviews

Juan Mata

Manager, Information Technology at Friendly House

A highly scalable and easy-to-learn product that blocks phishing and spam emails

The product must improve the features associated with creating a blacklist. Currently, to add a content block, I have to go to a different screen. It seems cumbersome. The solution sells Impersonation as a separate product. I don’t see why it cannot be in the same product like other vendors have.

Read full review

Robert Arbuckle

Security Analyst III at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Automatically isolates threats and integrates with logging to reduce response time

Overall, I would evaluate the Microsoft support level that I receive at probably about a seven, but that depends on the day. It has been spotty. We have had issues where the urgency level of the Microsoft support is not as high as ours, especially during a data breach or potential data breach situation. We have had issues with some of the offshore support being lackluster. One specific thing that comes to mind is we were on a support call with our CISO on the call, and the Microsoft agent, who did not actually work for Microsoft, is one of the vendors that Microsoft uses for support, said, "Just to set expectations, my lunch break is in an hour and I am going to go away then." For us, it was already ten o'clock at night and we had been working on this for a couple of hours, trying to get a security engineer on with us. For him to tell us that he was going to go away and have lunch, it was, "Okay, but go find somebody else if you need to." It was just the lackluster approach, and it seemed like he did not really care. We seem to get a lot of this when we get non-Microsoft support. I can identify areas for improvement with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, as it is kind of a convoluted mess to try to take care of false positives. Especially when they have been identified as false positives but they keep going off over and over again. It is great for my pocketbook because it generates a lot of on-call action, but I would really prefer more sleep at two o'clock in the morning than dealing with false positives. I would say that the unified portal for managing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is suitable for both teams as they are all in there. It would be great if they would stop moving things around and renaming things, which makes sense. The new XDR portal is pretty nice. Being able to have it central again inside of the regular Security Center without having to open up two windows is helpful. Overall, I think it is pretty good. There is always going to be something that could be improved, such as alerting and the ability to modify alerts would be a little bit helpful to have. Being able to add more data into the alerts and turn off alerts that are not as useful would be beneficial. It is hard to say what the quantitative impact the security exposure management feature has had on our company's security, because a lot of it is kind of subjective. I think we are sitting at around a fifty percent score still, and a lot of it is just kind of unusual circumstances that we cannot really implement without breaking the organization.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It was easy to learn the product."

"The most valuable feature of Barracuda Email Threat Scanner is the security it provides by delaying the delivery of suspicious emails until they can be reviewed inside the Barracuda control panel."

"The main benefit that I am getting from this solution is that it filters almost 95% of my spam mail. Some spam mails bypass Barracuda Email Threat Scanner, but when I add those domains or addresses to the filter list, they get blocked. Some users on my premises do not understand which mail attachments or links should be opened. By filtering with Barracuda Email Threat Scanner, we are not getting any type of phishing mails. So, our infrastructure is safer, and as an IT person, I feel relaxed."

"I like that Defender is integrated and doesn't have a third-party payload trying to advertise subscription renewal."

"The stability keeps getting better and better."

"The solution has an easy-to-use interface, is always updated, and is user-friendly."

"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has helped free up our SOC team to work on other projects or tasks."

"It comes included with the Windows license."

"The most likable feature of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is the sheer number of features and data it provides."

"We found that because the endpoint devices are based on Microsoft Windows devices and Windows Defender is integrated with the foundation and the core layer, it makes it more integrated and more agile in terms of responding to any security threats or changes or development"

"Microsoft's technical support is fantastic."

More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint pros

Cons

"If the price were lower, perhaps we could purchase our own."

"We had an incident last month where the PCs of one or two colleagues, who were outside of our factory and were using a defined network, got infected by some kind of malware. From their PCs, more than 1,000 mails were produced per hour, causing spamming on our mail server. Barracuda blocked the full mail communication. Only one to two accounts were compromised, and for that, Barracuda blocked all incoming and outgoing mails. It created a great problem for other users and our office activities. Our server was blocked for three days, which we did not expect. Technically, only one or two accounts should be blocked. When a domain or IP is blocked, communication becomes tough. It may be a configuration issue at our provider's end, where there was a mistake in configuring Barracuda. It could also be a problem related to Barracuda."

"The product must improve the features associated with creating a blacklist."

"Something that is unique to Microsoft is its licensing model. When you go out and you buy McAfee or Symantec, you know what you're getting out of the box, but with Microsoft, often, when you're looking to achieve a certain set of capabilities, those capabilities are spread across different products. You might try to do something you could do with CrowdStrike, but then find out that you also need to purchase Microsoft Defender for Identity or Microsoft Defender for Azure. You realize that when they talk about what they can offer within the Microsoft platform, it's really the suite of investments. So, sometimes, you may find yourself buying Defender for Endpoint thinking that it matches CrowdStrike, but then you find that Microsoft really needs to sell you something else. One plus one will equal three, but when you have a very concise platform, such as CrowdStrike, you know what you're going to get."

"I would just like them to have more consistency, and that's a comment that's across the board with Microsoft. They change things a lot."

"I miss having an executive dashboard or a simple view for viewing things. Everything is extensive in this solution. Everything is configurable and manageable, but the environment of Microsoft 365 has about 13 administrative dashboards, and in each of the dashboards, there are a gazillion things to set up. It is good for a large enterprise, but for a 200-seat client, you need to see 5% of that."

"It makes your Surface devices hot. It is resource-intensive. It strains your CPU, not more than other file scanners around, but it also does a lot more. When you are transmitting files or data, it is continuously scanning the traffic and analyzing it bit by bit to see what's going on, and that, of course, is costly in terms of CPU. It is CPU intensive, and if you are on battery, it drains your battery fast. That's the only drawback that it has."

"A challenge is that it is not a multi-tenant solution. Microsoft's tenant is a licensed tenant. I'm an MSSP. So, I have multiple customers. In Microsoft's world, that means that I can't just buy an E5 license and give that out to all my customers. That won't work because all of the customer data resides within a single tenant in Microsoft's world. Other products—such as SentinelOne, Palo Alto Cortex, CrowdStrike, et cetera—are multi-tenant. So, I can have it at the top of the pyramid for my analyst to look into it and see all the customers, but each customer's data is separate. If the customer wants to look at what we see, they would only see their data, whereas in the Microsoft world, if I've got multiple customers connected to the same Microsoft tenant, they would see everybody else's data, which is a privacy problem in Europe. It is not possible to share the data, and it is a breach of privacy."

"Windows Firewall is integrated with Windows Defender. Over the last few days, I have had a problem with defining a wildcard on Windows Firewall. For example, I wanted to pull out the connection of my program and install a software package with a lot of executable files. I wanted to prevent it from accessing the internet. I could not select executables by using a wildcard. I had to select a single executable with its full name."

"Defender is free for one year. Once that year is over, we will switch to Kaspersky."

"Alerts need to be sent immediately because as it is now, you see some of them without delay and others arrive perhaps 30 minutes later, and it leaves important gaps in terms of information gathering."

More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is a bit expensive."

"Barracuda Email Threat Scanner is provided by our IT service provider, who also provides all the support. The licensing fee that we pay to our provider is $200 per month, that is, $1 per user. There is no additional cost. Before taking the subscription from our provider, I researched the market for Barracuda. The cost is between $5,000 to $8,000 for three years. After that, the same cost is there for renewal. If you have 200 to 500 users, it is better to take a subscription from a provider. If you have more than 500 users, then you can own the Barracuda server through the cloud or on-premises deployments. It is costly for a lesser number of users. If you increase the usage or the number of users, then the overall cost decreases. They can reduce the cost of Barracuda Email Threat Scanner for a small number of users. We could not and would not have used this solution if we had not got the renting or subscription option."

"The license cost is around $35 per machine, which is not expensive compared to other products."

"The product is free of charge and comes integrated into Windows."

"There is no licensing fee."

"Currently, for us, Windows Defender is free with the purchase of Windows Server. Pricing is an important point for us when we are looking at the competitors of this solution. If we choose to go with another vendor, we will have to pay some license fees."

"We mostly use Microsoft products. We use Office 365, and we use Azure. We're also a Microsoft partner. So, the licensing was much cheaper for us, and at the same time, a lot of the features that we were looking for were included in Defender."

"Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is included with a Microsoft E5 license."

"It isn't cheap, but it's reasonable and fair."

"You don't need to worry about the renewal and purchase of antivirus products. It is bundled with Windows 10, so you don't need to worry about separately purchasing any antiviruses."

More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Performing Arts

11%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	80
Midsize Enterprise	40
Large Enterprise	92

Questions from the Community

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How is Cortex XDR compared with Microsoft Defender?

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security solution. The tool reduces the attack surface, applies behavioral-based endpoint protection and response, and includes risk-ba...

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Which offers better endpoint security - Symantec or Microsoft Defender?

We use Symantec because we do not use MS Enterprise products, but in my opinion, Microsoft Defender is a superior solution. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud-delivered endpoint security s...

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How does Microsoft Defender for Endpoint compare with Crowdstrike Falcon?

The CrowdStrike solution delivers a lot of information about incidents. It has a very light sensor that will never push your machine hardware to "test", you don't have the usual "scan now" feature ...

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Comparisons

Huntress Managed EDR vs Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL]

Compared 18% of the time

TitanHQ SpamTitan vs Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL]

Compared 16% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon vs Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL]

Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) vs Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL]

Compared 12% of the time

VirusTotal vs Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL]

Compared 9% of the time

More Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] Competitors

HP Wolf Security vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Compared 5% of the time

Symantec Endpoint Security vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Compared 5% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Compared 4% of the time

Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Compared 4% of the time

F-Secure Total vs Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Anti-Malware Tools

January 2026

Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] report

Download Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint

January 2026

Download Microsoft Defender for Endpoint product report

Also Known As

No data available

Microsoft Defender ATP, Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection, MS Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Defender Antivirus

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Barracuda Networks

Microsoft

Overview

Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] offers a comprehensive analysis of email threats by integrating seamlessly into existing systems, providing a detailed threat assessment for enterprise-level security.

Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] is known for its precise detection capabilities and effective threat analysis, enhancing email security. It quickly identifies risks without affecting workflow, making it essential for businesses focused on safeguarding their communication channels. Its proactive scanning enhances security by identifying latent threats.

What features make Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] effective?

Comprehensive Threat Analysis: Thoroughly evaluates incoming emails for potential threats.
Seamless Integration: Easily integrates with existing email systems without disruption.
Real-time Alerts: Provides immediate notifications for detected threats.
Advanced Reporting: Offers detailed insights into threat patterns and vulnerabilities.
User-Friendly Interface: Designed for ease of use with minimal technical expertise required.

Why consider Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] for email security?

Increased Protection: Boosts overall email security by identifying hidden threats.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces potential financial impact by preventing security breaches.
Time Savings: Automates threat detection, freeing up valuable IT resources.
Enhanced Compliance: Helps meet industry-specific compliance requirements.
Business Continuity: Ensures uninterrupted business operations by preventing email-based attacks.

In finance, healthcare, and retail, Barracuda Email Threat Scanner [EOL] is often implemented to meet strict regulatory and security standards, mitigating risks linked to confidential client data breaches and transaction fraud. It aids industries in maintaining secure communications, essential to safeguarding sensitive information.

Barracuda Networks

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a comprehensive security solution that provides advanced threat protection for organizations. It offers real-time protection against various types of cyber threats, including malware, viruses, ransomware, and phishing attacks.

With its powerful machine-learning capabilities, it can detect and block sophisticated attacks before they can cause any harm. The solution also includes endpoint detection and response (EDR) capabilities, allowing organizations to quickly investigate and respond to security incidents. It provides detailed insights into the attack timeline, enabling security teams to understand the scope and impact of an incident.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint also offers proactive threat hunting, allowing organizations to proactively search for and identify potential threats within their network. It integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft security solutions, such as Microsoft Defender XDR, to provide a unified and holistic security approach. With its centralized management console, organizations can easily deploy, configure, and monitor the security solution across their entire network.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a robust and scalable security solution that helps organizations protect their endpoints and data from evolving cyber threats.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Entisys 360,

Petrofrac, Metro CSG, Christus Health

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, SentinelOne, Check Point Software Technologies and others in Anti-Malware Tools. Updated: January 2026.

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