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Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs IRONSCALES comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

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...
Ranking in Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
DMARC Authentication Software (2nd)
IRONSCALES
Ranking in Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
7th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Email Security (18th), Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Secure Email Gateway (SEG) category, the mindshare of Barracuda Email Security Gateway is 10.3%, down from 16.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IRONSCALES is 4.4%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Secure Email Gateway (SEG)
 

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.
Orion Trist - PeerSpot reviewer
Saved us a big deal by catching malicious links and attachments sent directly to our staff and has also been helpful for educating our staff
It has helped immensely because it has gotten rid of malicious links and malicious attachments that have been targeted at our different staff members. It has definitely protected us on more than one occasion. Their integrated approach of combining email security and employee awareness training is excellent because the training is a reminder for staff to continually be on their feet and look out for the ever-changing landscape. It also lets us know who has been trained, who hasn't been trained, and what they're like. It integrates a risk ratio for all our employees. Its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities are very important because I don't want to have to manage 24/7. Having the AI to do a lot of the work for me is invaluable. Its automated detection and response capabilities are excellent. It does a wonderful job. They provide all the stats on what it has done. It gives you information about how much time is saved and all that kind of good information. Its automated detection and response capabilities have massively decreased the time we spend manually reviewing email events. Since May, it has taken care of 170 hours. So, it has saved 88 hours per analyst. It is very good in terms of the customization of the automated detection and response capabilities. It is granular, and you can adjust it however you want. If it is too high, you can turn it down. If it is too low, you can turn it up.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Barracuda is good at keeping the garbage from reaching your inbox."
"The client has the option to blacklist or whitelist any email address or domain based on the sender and recipient filters. If they want, they can restrict any IP addresses so email won't be received from those IP addresses."
"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."
"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."
"This product is powerful and quite simple to use."
"Great at blocking spam."
"Its backups are valuable."
"It can scale."
"For what was being offered with IRONSCALES, I feel like we got an incredible deal."
"Their anti-phishing platform is absolutely fantastic. The automated AI piece is amazing, and their technical support is fantastic."
"The most valuable features of the solution are that it is easy to set it up, install, and manage the product."
"For me, the mobile app is most valuable. All other features are also very useful, but the mobile app makes it really easy for me to manage on the go. I don't have to be at my desk. I could be at the shops, or it could be in the evening when I am out, and I can get a notification on my phone that there is an incident that has been raised. I can sort it out very quickly without having to be at my work PC."
"The biggest benefit is that we get fewer phishing and spam emails, so using IRONSCALES has made our environment much safer."
"The solution captures a bit more of the unknown, quantifies it, and applies intelligence to it to pick out and stop a lot of phishing emails that come through."
"There is buzz around phishing awareness training. When I make a campaign, all of a sudden people in our organization are talking, thinking, and wondering about it. Therefore, it keeps people on their toes. That is perfect because it does exactly what we want it to do."
"I would say the most valuable feature is what they call Themis. It's like a virtual analyst that uses the decisions that system admins make to generate a score for whether an email is legitimate, spam, or phishing. It gets better based on the decisions that we make over time. The automation piece is great as well. The integrated approach of email security combined with employee awareness training is excellent."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the management of multiple domains."
"There are limited administration controls that should be improved."
"Barracuda Email Security Gateway can improve email detection. We have some emails that are bypassing the threat scanning. There are some impersonation emails passing through."
"The initial setup can be a little bit complex."
"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."
"False positives have given us issues."
"Barracuda has shown difficulty in providing us with the solutions we sought."
"We had an incident where we didn't want to receive any emails or spam from a certain site and email address. We selected the mail ID, and we send it to Barracuda for analysis to see if it's spam or something like that. As of now, we haven't gotten any update or notification as to what happened with it."
"In addition to integrated training, they should also have personalized training that you don't have to do as part of a phishing campaign or a simulation."
"There is a feature called Account Takeover, which isn't what I want it to be able to do. I know that they're working on that, but when they first started the Account Takeover feature in incident management, it didn't have much information. It didn't have any usability to it. I already had tools in place that were better."
"The integration with Google Suite needs to be better. it's something they can work on."
"I would like it if IRONSCALES had some sort of reminder mechanism, meaning IRONSCALES knows if a user completed the training or not. As long as it hasn't been completed, it keeps reminding every so often, alerts the manager, etc. Right now, it is all in the hands of the employee, and not all of them continue the process, which is a shame."
"I think the tool can continue to hone the product to ensure the detections are accurate."
"There's room for improvement in the campaign management. IRONSCALES has many built-in templates that I use, but you can also build templates from scratch. However, the interface for creating custom templates needs to be updated."
"The simulation and training piece could be improved by having more granularity in terms of scheduling how campaigns are run and allowing people to directly take the training rather than having to go through an official campaign. That's not available yet."
"The only thing that I could say is that some of the reporting features could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As far as advanced email security systems, this product is mid-range on the pricing scale."
"This is one of the major points for integrating this solution in any organization. Barracuda Email Security Gateway needs to make it a bit more tolerable for customers because it is increasing every year. They should create a plan for reducing the cost."
"The licensing fees are part of a bundled support package that we pay for."
"For overall value and cost, Barracuda came in as most appropriate, price as well as services provided. In terms of price, it's average . It's not the most expensive, it's not the least expensive but it works well."
"It is an expensive solution and I would rate it 5 out of 10."
"The price of Barracuda Email Security Gateway is approximately $17 per user annually."
"e solution's pricing is exceedingly high, and it continues to increase."
"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 pay $3000 plus a little more a year for the number of employees we have, and we're not even that big. The solution is at the higher end in terms of cost. It's not the most expensive product, but I would say it's worth the price if you have a high volume of email traffic. In our case, the solution has inspected over 162,000 emails between three and four months. It saved us a lot of time and money. It's a worthwhile investment because a bad actor only has to succeed once; we must defend against everything in our business. IRONSCALES offers a sense of security and confidence from being well protected."
"As compared to everything else we looked at, it was good. It was the best value for the dollars."
"There is an installation cost. Since we have this as a managed service, we pay for licensing and the managed service itself. Other than that, there are no additional costs."
"I don't know about its pricing because I don't run the budget or pay the bills, but if it was extortionate, we probably would be looking to scrap it, and because we are not, I assume its price is okay."
"Considering the value it provides, it is definitely worth the cost. We don't have to do manual analysis and remediation of phishing emails, which saves us a lot of hours. Its licensing is based on the number of users being supported and the number of email addresses being protected. I'm not aware of any additional costs."
"They are pretty much the same as all the other competitors in the market."
"The product is available as a middle-priced tool. I think it is not the cheapest solution."
"The tool is not very cheap, but it is affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
51%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
University
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 IRONSCALES?
The solution captures a bit more of the unknown, quantifies it, and applies intelligence to it to pick out and stop a lot of phishing emails that come through.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IRONSCALES?
The product is available as a middle-priced tool. I think it is not the cheapest solution. There are other solutions apart from IRONSCALES that are more expensive, while some are a little bit more ...
What needs improvement with IRONSCALES?
I think maybe on the side of the awareness training, the tool can improve a little more information and have some other languages since even though English is good, Spanish is not so good. The tool...
 

Also Known As

Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall, Barracuda Sentinel
No data available
 

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
Allegheny Millwork, Ayrshire College, Nium, Orris, Paramount School District, Pres Les, PRT Staffing, Recovery Unplugged, Telit, WebHelp
Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs. IRONSCALES and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
848,989 professionals have used our research since 2012.