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

Barracuda Email Protection vs Cisco Secure Email comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

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 Security
12th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Email Archiving (2nd), Office 365 Protection (4th)
Cisco Secure Email
Ranking in Email Security
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
Cisco Security Portfolio (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Email Security category, the mindshare of Barracuda Email Protection is 3.1%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Email is 5.3%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Security Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cisco Secure Email5.3%
Barracuda Email Protection3.1%
Other91.6%
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

LeeMiles - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Information Technology at St Albans High School For Girls
Very good threat protection, spam filtering, and cloud backups
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 set up a global setting. Users must go through an induction session where I guide them in configuring quarantine alerts rather than having default settings based on group membership. This seems like an oversight since they already use Active Directory details. They should assign policies based on group membership, which configures these settings by default.
BD
Chief Information Security Officer at Abcl
Threat intelligence with fast attack detection enables comprehensive email protection
In some cases, detection is missed, leading to false positives where genuine emails are flagged as spam. This could result in users not opening genuine emails. We have highlighted this to Cisco because sometimes phishing or marketing campaigns, which are genuine, are incorrectly flagged as spam. The solution should better analyze the actual content rather than only focusing on the email header or origin.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I'm quite satisfied with the graphical user interface for Barracuda products."
"The solution's most valuable feature is impersonation detection."
"The solution is straightforward to set up."
"When we got the service, it included the email archiver with unlimited storage."
"The archiving and search features are very good."
"The best feature of Barracuda Email Protection is that it provides protection for Microsoft 365."
"The product is easy to deploy and maintain."
"We check the reports sometimes to see that frequent attacks and malicious emails are being blocked by the solution."
"Capital expenditure is a significant consideration, and the impact on major expenditures prompts a careful analysis before onboarding the new product."
"There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails."
"The most valuable features are protection against ransomware and spam."
"It has the ability to tell us, after an email has been delivered, where else it went, once it got inside. Maybe it's something we wanted it to stop and it didn't stop it, but it notified us later that it was something that it should have stopped. It can give us a trajectory of all the other places that it went internally and it can tell us what files were transferred as well."
"I can customize the configuration and policies."
"The solution is very configurable. It has enabled us to configure some specific filters to stop emails that general configurations didn't stop. It's a powerful solution. It can analyze a lot of emails simultaneously, with no problems of capacity or system load."
"The system provides our service desk with the means to troubleshoot email delivery issues with ease."
"At one point, there was a zero-day attack. The Cisco appliance detected it and stopped it, helping us out. We avoided the attack and potential damage."
 

Cons

"The technology works on a supervised engine, but it would be better if it ran on an unsupervised engine."
"I would like to see better integration with other products."
"The solution's graphical user interface (GUI) could be improved visually."
"Barracuda Essentials can improve by continually adding more features."
"The solution's reporting mechanism is a little poor and could be improved."
"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."
"The platform's pricing needs improvement."
"Barracuda Email Protection needs better reporting and more robust integration with security awareness training platforms and third-party solutions."
"I use the search all the time. Sometimes, it is hard to search for things and things are hard to find. People come to me all the time, saying, "This email didn't get through." Then, I go searching and don't find it on the first search. You have to think about alternative searches. I don't know if there is an easier way that they could help to find things. I don't know how they could simplify it, because now everybody else is using the cloud and everything is coming from Office 365, or whatever. It is just not the same environment from years ago where everybody had their own server and you could search easier."
"We cannot manage multiple devices from a single UI."
"The primary areas for improvement are the pricing and the complexity of deployment."
"The solution needs to improve its advanced phishing filters. It is very good at filtering things which have bad reputations. However, when phishing or malicious emails are new or coming from a legitimate source, we don't feel that the solution is working."
"The solution does not have a strong outbound service. It should also integrate DLP."
"Cisco is already providing a very good environment with the IronPort solution, but there could be some more integration with other products. For instance, an integration with the EDR solution could be there to raise an alert."
"We have occasionally had hardware problems because we are using an appliance-based solution, but that might change. We may consider going to virtual systems."
"The UI is definitely one area of improvement because it doesn't match other interfaces and the navigation can be a little clunky."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is similar to that of Microsoft 365."
"The price of Barracuda Essentials is better than some of the competing products."
"Barracuda licensing model is good."
"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."
"We didn't have to pay a lot for the solution because we got it from a good vendor with a good user volume."
"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."
"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."
"It is expensive. I would rate it 2 out of 10, where 1 is the most expensive and 10 is the cheapest."
"The product's price falls on the higher side when compared to the other products on the market."
"I rate the product price as six on a scale of one to ten, where one means it is a very expensive tool."
"Compared to Cisco's on-prem service, the cost is the same, but you don't have to pay for the hardware and you don't have to maintain the system, as far as upgrades and hardware failures are concerned. It is cheaper to operate on their cloud service than it is to operate with their on-prem service."
"In my previous organization, avoiding four instances of CryptoLocker within an estimated six month period is approximately $600,000 in lost time and effort. Our five year cost was about a million dollars, and the four outages that we had equated to 65 percent of that five year cost."
"It is a relatively expensive option compared to other alternatives."
"The pricing is good."
"As per market availability, this solution is more expensive than other vendors."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Email Security solutions are best for your needs.
879,371 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise18
Large Enterprise25
 

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?
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...
What do you like most about Cisco Secure Email?
Cisco Secure Email is a budget-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Email?
The pricing structure is good as it is user-based or email client-based, which is positive for clients.
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Email?
The user interface of the Email Security Gateway ( /products/security-gateway-reviews ) should be improved. It would be beneficial to have the functionality of the Email Threat Defense integrated i...
 

Also Known As

Barracuda Essentials
Cisco Email Security, IronPort, Cisco Email Security, ESA, Email Security Appliances
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ACT Government, Acumen Group, AGIP, Delta Dental Plans Association, Desai/Nasr Consulting Engineers, Inc., Equinox Information Systems
SUNY Old Westbury, CoxHealth, City of Fullerton, Indra
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Email Protection vs. Cisco Secure Email and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,371 professionals have used our research since 2012.