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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) (4th)
Cisco Secure Email
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (2nd), 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 16.2% compared to last year.
Cisco Secure Email, on the other hand, focuses on Email Security, holds 6.7% mindshare, down 8.7% 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 solution's anti-spam features are its most valuable aspect."
"The most valuable feature is the Antispam services, which are the basic services of spam device"
"The link protection and anti-phishing features are great."
"We find the product to be scalable."
"I like Barracuda's cloud sandbox feature."
"It is lightweight, and we can filter all of our inbound and outbound emails. We have controls for rate control, quarantine, and tagging. We can see whether an email is a spam email or a phishing email."
"With the cloud service, one of the nice things about Barracuda is the quarantine service. It gives the ability for our users to go in and check what has been quarantined, and then connect with our IT staff to release anything that should be fine so that we can test it before we release."
"The most valuable feature of Barracuda Email Security Gateway is the complete capabilities it provides. Additionally, the phishing security and sandbox features are effective."
"Because we scan products, and there is a lot of critical data, security is very important in these cases."
"Cisco Secure Email is part of Cisco's extensive efforts and investments in technology, especially in the realm of cyber security. The product is one among many security solutions offered by Cisco."
"We like the in-built features, like the email filtering based on the IP and domain. Cisco has its own blacklisted domains and IPs, which is very good. This filters around 70 percent of emails from spam, and we are seeing fewer false positives with this."
"The most valuable feature is the different content filters we are using, such as DKIM."
"It has the IMS engine, Intelligent Multi-Scan engine, and it does a good job, right out-of-the-box, of blocking the vast majority of things that should be blocked."
"The technical support from Cisco is perfect."
"Initially, the most valuable feature for us was the SenderBase Reputation, because that reduced the number of emails that were even considered by the system by a huge number..."
"There are a lot of filters for scam emails and things like that work out of the box. You can also use the antivirus features. I like its features."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the management of multiple domains."
"The dashboard's UI could be improved to make changes to the blocklist."
"The scalability needs improvement, it's the only feature that is required."
"The reports are standard, and it would be nice to be able to customize them."
"The spam filtering is a little too aggressive. You can not get granular enough to back off on what is considered spam and what is not."
"Spam is not always detected, and it should be more automated. We have seen that some emails are allowed by these emails, which are then stopped by Microsoft."
"I would like to have better integration with third-party archival vendors to facilitate moving data in and out."
"Barracuda Email Security Gateway should include ATP in the next release."
"There could be additional DLP functionality for it."
"If you are not a technical guy, it is hard to maneuver, but as soon as you work on it, it gets better and better. If there was a better way to know how to do things or how to find things, it would be good."
"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."
"The product's GUI for the dashboard needs improvement."
"The management features of the product are not up to date."
"They could improve the filters. In my time at the company, there were several times we had to contact support to update the filters."
"One of the things that Cisco could improve on with IronPort is the support. Cisco doesn't really have enough engineers who have full, hands-on knowledge of IronPort. Knowledge of it is not something you can find easily compared to other security appliances."
"We have been struggling in the last month with Cisco encryption and with the S/MIME encryption. I don't know if it is an issue on our side or if these features of the solution are not working very well."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution should be reduced. The price in the USA is less than where we are. Our local distributor of the solution is manipulating the market."
"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."
"As far as advanced email security systems, this product is mid-range on the pricing scale."
"We paid for an annual license."
"I rate the price of Barracuda Email Security Gateway a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"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."
"There is an annual license required for this solution."
"The solution is priced low. We have received a good price discount here in Sri Lanka. There are additional licenses we have to purchase a license for the ATP."
"Cisco Secure Email is more expensive than other products. I rate it a five out of ten. There are no additional costs. You only need to pay the subscription amounts."
"As per market availability, this solution is more expensive than other vendors."
"It is a relatively expensive option compared to other alternatives."
"Cisco Secure Email is expensive, but we get what we pay for."
"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 not that costly. We pay for the solution through a contractor and pay an annual fee."
"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 licensing was all transferred."
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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
53%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Educational Organization
34%
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
4%
 

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.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.