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Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs Cisco Secure Email comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 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 Security Ga...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
DMARC Authentication Software (2nd), Secure Email Gateway (SEG) (3rd)
Cisco Secure Email
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (3rd), Cisco Security Portfolio (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Messaging and Collaboration solutions, they serve different purposes. Barracuda Email Security Gateway is designed for Secure Email Gateway (SEG) and holds a mindshare of 10.3%, down 17.0% compared to last year.
Cisco Secure Email, on the other hand, focuses on Email Security, holds 7.1% mindshare, down 8.8% since last year.
Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
Email Security
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed Shah Newaj - PeerSpot reviewer
Instantly blocked and reduced our spam emails
The solution has to improve in a very specific way. When we allow our customers to send or scan email through our Barracuda Email Security Gateway, we are permitting their email server IP address, but not any domain. One of our customers has an email server where they are hosting five domains within their server. They are sending and receiving email through that server by using Barracuda Email Security Gateway. Therefore, we allow their IP address to send email through our Barracuda Email Security Gateway, then we declare MX for receiving email on behalf of our customers. After receiving the email, we deliver it to the specific IP address of the customer. Since we are only allowing the IP address, if an incident happens within a customer's email server or an email server gets compromised, then it starts sending spam. That creates a huge problem for the solution as it allows all emails because the customer's IP address is allowed to relay email through our Barracuda Email Security Gateway. Barracuda should add an option where it can add multiple domains, such as abc.com, bbc.com, and cbc.com. Therefore, this domains' emails will be allowed and other domains' emails will not be relayed through Barracuda Email Security Gateway. Whereas, if you allow the IP address, then any of the domain's emails will be relayed through Barracuda Email Security Gateway. That is the drawback that I have observed. So, Barracuda should work on this.
Kostas Karidas - PeerSpot reviewer
Helps prevent security breaches but fails to improve in the area of AI
I have not noticed any impressive advanced threat protection mechanisms in the tool. I don't know if there are any AI features in the product. I don't know if there is any other technology embedded in the solution. Cisco Secure Email successfully mitigated potential email threats. My company has seen plenty of scenarios where Cisco Secure Email successfully mitigated potential email threats, spam emails, and fraudulent domains. The product is good for dealing with spam emails, and it can take care of more than 100 spam emails per day. A huge number of spam emails are monitored with the help of Cisco Secure Email. I would not recommend the product to other businesses because you need to have some kind of expertise in configuring and knowing a bit about the tool's GUI. The tool also lacks in the area of AI mechanics. If I would like to have an overview and review another solution, I would go for another product other than Cisco Secure Email. I can definitely suggest others to look at the product and review it, but I would also recommend that they compare it with the other solutions in the market. I wouldn't prioritize Cisco Secure Email over other tools. Either the support partner of the product or I take care of the tool's maintenance phase by looking into the configurations and doing some fine-tuning. I rate the tool a seven to eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The spam filtering, in particular, is very important for us. We have a large volume of emails each month, something like 200,000, and Barracuda filters about 85 percent of the spam, malware, and phishing that comes in. It prevents our users from receiving this content on their computers."
"We find the product to be scalable."
"Eliminating inbox clutter creates an opportunity to be more productive instead of wasting time manually sorting through spam."
"Great at blocking spam."
"Thanks to Barracuda Email Security Gateway, I have seen increases in productivity and functionality in terms of spam reduction and filtering against different threats, which is a benefit by default."
"The most valuable feature of the Barracuda Email Security Gateway is the ATP."
"There are plenty of features, such as sandboxing capabilities with zero threat protection. It has all the leading email security appliances compared to other solutions."
"One advantage is its immediate deployment capability. So the fast speed to deploy is a big plus point."
"The tool comes with AI features. It is good for clients who already use Cisco products due to integration."
"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."
"There were detailed logs available. That was a seriously good feature... It turns out these were actually spoof emails that came into our environment. I got to know about them from the log system."
"There is a huge return compared to if we didn't have a gateway appliance, as far as blocking malicious emails."
"Anti-Spam and Advanced Malware Protection are the most valuable features... and we also have the option to block Zero-day attacks."
"It integrates with Active Directory and we can limit specific users to using specific applications."
"The most significant enhancement we've gained is in terms of security through the upgrade we received."
"ATP has been the most valuable in improving our email security posture."
 

Cons

"I am not aware of the licensing costs."
"The reports are standard, and it would be nice to be able to customize them."
"There are limited administration controls that should be improved."
"False positives have given us issues."
"Artificial intelligence improvement could be used to help block spam and phishing mail that is directly delivered to users."
"The UI could be a little cleaner and require less clicking around in different modules. They give the illusion of a single pane of glass, but as you click around to different products, you're actually being transferred into a different system."
"The initial setup can be a little bit complex."
"My customers were sending OPT bulk emails and Barracuda Email Security Gateway was not able to handle it. We have to go with another different solution, such FortiMail for the task. We are implementing these combinations of the Barracuda and FortiGate, for email security. The FortiGate FortiMail security gateway we use to send only the bulk email, not for receiving emails."
"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."
"Typically, in a phishing email, they try to use a name everybody's going to recognize, like the CEO's name or the CFO's name... With this appliance, the way it's designed at the moment, for us to really stop that with any level of confidence, we have to build a dictionary of all the names of the people we want it to check, and all the ways they could be spelled. My name would be in there as Phillip Collins, Phillip D. Collins, Phillip Dean Collins, Phil Collins, Phil D. Collins. There could be eight or 10 variations of my name that we'd have to put in the dictionary. There's no artificial intelligence to say "Phil Collins" could be all these other things, and to stop phishing from coming through in that way."
"They can do it better with web links, with the URLs. They have a technology called Outbreak but it doesn't work as well as we would like."
"The user interface needs some improvement to become more user-friendly. The graphics could be better. It's designed more for a technical user rather than a business user."
"While Cisco offers excellent solutions and innovations, the pricing may not be suitable for everyone. The cost of the software is relatively high. In the current market, there are numerous competitive alternatives that focus on security, enterprise networks, and various other aspects. Cisco, being a comprehensive provider, extends its expertise across data, servers, storage, and security, making them a preferred choice for many enterprises. However, when it comes specifically to security solutions, there are other vendors that specialize solely in this domain, offering competitive options."
"Cisco Secure Email can be improved from the administrator's point of view. Usually, you have to work with different areas, and they can try to make it easy for the administrator to use different functions."
"We would like to see more options for the customization of content filters."
"I would like to see sandboxing for email, where suspicious emails received by the system are analyzed through online services."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is an annual license required for this solution."
"We pay between $8 and $10 USD per user per month."
"We are using the trial version right now, and before purchasing the license, we need to solve some of the issues that we are facing. We need a proper solution for our email, and then we will look into pricing. We have a vendor for licensing."
"We typically purchase a one or three-year license for Barracuda Email Security Gateway."
"e solution's pricing is exceedingly high, and it continues to increase."
"The price of this solution is very high, but it's working fine."
"The price of Barracuda Email Security Gateway is approximately $17 per user annually."
"It is a cost-effective and relatively cheap solution as compared to others. Our customers have a yearly subscription. We do have a few customers with monthly subscriptions, but they have cloud-based Email protection, which is a different type of solution. Both solutions are very good."
"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."
"The licensing is a mess and needs sorting out. I am not really concerned about the pricing because I only make recommendations, not buying decisions."
"The license was not per user, the license model was per feature. You could choose anti-virus, anti-spam, etc. It was feature-based and charged yearly."
"The pricing is good."
"Cisco Secure Email is expensive, but we get what we pay for."
"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."
"The pricing for the Cisco Email Security Appliance involves recurring costs for licenses based on the contracted time frame, such as one year, three years, or five years. Renewals are required after the license expires."
"It is expensive. I would rate it 2 out of 10, where 1 is the most expensive and 10 is the cheapest."
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Answers from the Community

KK
Dec 12, 2022
Dec 12, 2022
Hi Kamal, Firstly, you would have to recognize that there is/are no fast and hard rules to choosing a final preferred product, what works well for company A may not work extensively well for company B. Reason being that: the efficiency of the Security capabilities provided by one tool can be amplified by another tool, particularly for secure email gateway. Hence, if you have an XDR that you in...
2 out of 7 answers
SimonClark - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 20, 2022
Top brands don't mean best or most cost-effective. My advice is to look a bit further before you make a decision. Evidence suggests that most top brands are pretty good at detecting and blocking malicious attachments, best case letting through 1%, but can be worse than 50% when it comes to detecting malicious links in the text of the email.  There are numerous less well-known vendors with lower-cost AI-based solutions that have a far better success rate, also providing employees the ability to report on suspect emails which auto-removes them from other staff members' inboxes until they have been properly assessed. Some will provide a visual risk score to the recipient to give them advance warning to be more cautious. Combining this kind of capability with staff awareness products keeps your vendor list lower and further improves efficiency. For around £2 GBP per user per month (less than $3) we provide different vendors depending upon the customer's environment but provided as a managed service. This allows our customers to outsource some of the monitoring and day-to-day management, spread the cost on a monthly basis, and flex how many licences they need on a monthly basis too i.e. if you drop 20 users don't pay for them but if you increase by 20 you don't need complex co-termination and pro rata discussions.
DM
Jun 21, 2022
I only can recommend Cisco because it´s the only one with which I'd worked enough. I think it is powerful enough and has a lot of possibilities. In addition, to a great support team. 
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
54%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Government
3%
Educational Organization
30%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Barracuda Email Security Gateway?
Barracuda Email Security Gateway is very simple to use.
What needs improvement with Barracuda Email Security Gateway?
Barracuda Email Security Gateway should include ATP in the next release.
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 licensing is a mess and needs sorting out. I am not really concerned about the pricing because I only make recommendations, not buying decisions.
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Email?
The user interface needs massive improvement. While the device works fine and it's not complicated to write policies, renaming menu items and showing policy flow in conjunction with the application...
 

Also Known As

Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall, Barracuda Sentinel
Cisco Email Security, IronPort, Cisco Email Security, ESA, Email Security Appliances
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Evolution Recruitment Solutions, Evans Delivery Company, Osoyoos Credit Union, Synovis Life Technologies, Camden County Technical Schools, DEK, Evans Delivery Company, Colgate Rochester Crozer, Hemmera, South Carolina Heart Center, Ferma Corporation, Major League Baseball (MLB), Healy Brothers Automotive Group
SUNY Old Westbury, CoxHealth, City of Fullerton, Indra
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs. Cisco Secure Email and other solutions. Updated: January 2024.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.