Barracuda Email Protection vs Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Barracuda Email Protection and Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Email Security solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Barracuda Email Protection vs. Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration Report (Updated: May 2024).
770,394 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Threat Explorer is an invaluable tool for me, and it plays a crucial role in helping me discern the origins of various email campaigns, pinpointing where they emanate from, and identifying the individuals within our organization who are affected.""Defender for Office 365 has helped eliminate having to look at multiple dashboards and that is the aspect I like most about it. It is simpler, effective, and convenient. The users like the process efficiency.""It gives us visibility into threats and, for endpoints, it helps us to prioritize threats. We used to have a lack of visibility, but now our time to detect and respond has decreased.""Defender is a SaaS platform, so it offers more flexibility. Managing the permissions is easier. The solution's automated detection and response features are scalable.""The solution is very easy to use. All you have to do is to assign the license to the end-user and it's done. The customer will only have the feature activated, and the solution will monitor the emails to determine if they are a threat or not.""At the moment we are satisfied with this product. It's a stable, scalable, and resilient solution for us.""The good part is that you don't have to configure it, which is very convenient.""The product's scalability is good."

More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pros →

"Barracuda email protection is stable. I would give it a nine because of its strong cybersecurity features.""The most valuable features are security and ease of use.""We now have a secondary backup of Office 365 that's much easier to retrieve compared to Microsoft. If someone deletes something in Office 365, we can get it back within Office 365, but it's difficult. Barracuda is much easier. There is a lot less management needed using Barracuda. The management becomes much easier for Office 365 and it's no longer on-prem, so there are fewer hours managing on-prem devices, servers, and things of that nature. We don't have network appliances anymore for the backup of our information.""The product is easy to deploy and maintain.""When we got the service, it included the email archiver with unlimited storage.""The most valuable features of Barracuda Essentials are it's a trusted name and is rated very high on review sites. It blocks high percentages of spam and junk email and it's in the cloud. They have hardware appliances, but this is in the cloud. The solution is very effective at blocking malware and blocking spam and this is what we are looking for. There's not a whole lot of complexity, you want a solution that is very good at blocking out all of the unwanted emails.""The solution is straightforward to set up.""The best feature of Barracuda Email Protection is that it provides protection for Microsoft 365."

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"Encryption of emails enhances safe communication that ransomware attacks cannot compromise.""The fact that we can share documents without emailing them and still be confident they will go through the corresponding scrutiny is great.""The main benefit is that hackers can't steal information.""I can count the number of endpoints, emails, and collaborations being used in the environment.""This product enhances faster and more secure sharing of information among colleagues from different departments.""Machine Learning and AI for email security have helped all the organization's members to guard their information against insecure exposure.""Its characteristics are adapted to the most modern threats.""The program has a nice interface and it is easy to use."

More Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration Pros →

Cons
"There is room for improvement in terms of reporting.""Microsoft sometimes has downtime, and we'll get several incidents coming in back to back. We have a huge backlog of notifications, many of which may be false positives. However, there might be serious alerts, so we can't risk dismissing all of them at once.""We noticed that from time to time, Microsoft's stability does have problems. Sometimes the service goes up and down. Sometimes they change without prior notice.""The visibility for the weaknesses in the system and unauthorized access can be improved.""We need a separate license and we don't know how to get the license that is required.""About eight months ago, we started to measure the quantity of phishing and spam that we have been receiving, and it has been increasing a lot. That means that protection for our email is not as good as we were expecting.""The custom alerts have to improve a lot.""Microsoft Defender for Office 365 could improve by giving customers information on techniques to prevent threats. For example, information about best practices on how to protect their own devices against hackers and scammers, such as educational information or training. This would help others have a better understanding of cyber security. Additionally, there can be more security features added."

More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Cons →

"There is room for improvement, particularly in reaching out to technical support during deployment.""The policies are set up in Barracuda by default; we don't have any control over them.""The customer service and support could be improved if the support were available directly in Europe. Currently, the support is often managed from India, so we sometimes need to wait due to the time zone difference. It would be quicker and better if the support were provided by European staff.""The platform's pricing needs improvement.""Barracuda Essentials can improve by continually adding more features.""The solution's graphical user interface (GUI) could be improved visually.""I would like to see some additional functionality in terms of employee monitoring, as part of a work-from-home security solution.""Sometimes it is somewhat laggy, especially on the Archiver side. It should have improved performance on their Message Archiver."

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"Cloud Guard would be a complete solution if Check Point added a comprehensive data loss solution that included capabilities such as bulk data transfer detection.""There are a few areas for improvement. One is the occasional sluggishness or latency, which is likely due to the cloud-based nature of the solution. So, the performance can be better.""We understand that false positives are always there, but sometimes the notifications are more than expected.""Check Point Infinity Portal sometimes feels a bit slow, and there are performance issues that should be easy to fix.""I would like Check Point to extend its coverage to include more cloud applications.""From time to time, the system's administrators notice the increase in the false-positive alerts being reported by CloudGuard SaaS.""Other vendor support teams go after fixing the issue the moment that they join the remote session. The problem that I have faced with Check Point support is that they share the case number with me, then it takes at least two days for them to join a remote session with us, even though we have asked for this timeframe to change. Even though we have already explained the problems that we are facing or the business pain points in our network on the call or email, we have to repeat the problem statements again in the console. It can take four or five days to resolve the issue from the moment they understand the problem. This includes the time to teach their R&D or internal team whatever the issue is. I have faced timeframes as long as seven to 10 days for fixing some issues.""After updates, the internet connection fails, and I have to restart my desktop to resume initial functionalities."

More Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It's a user-base subscription."
  • "From the pricing point of view, like any other product in the market, there is scope for negotiation."
  • "Defender is a little bit more expensive as compared to others. We are in the manufacturing environment. So, we don't have a high budget for all of our endpoint devices. Its cost is a major concern for us."
  • "For licensing, it's usually a yearly package for customers who are subscribed to Office 365, but they can also pay on a monthly basis."
  • "Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is an add-on to the Office license. Many customers are purchasing this solution."
  • "Microsoft Defender for Office 365 comes with Microsoft Windows. It is free with the operating system."
  • "The solution saves money so we have seen a return on investment."
  • "Defender for 365 comes in various plans and licenses, along with other Microsoft security solutions. Purchasing this kind of package or security bundle gives good value for money, and that's what I recommend."
  • More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The price of Barracuda Essentials is better than some of the competing products."
  • "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."
  • "Price-wise, this product is middle-of-the-road."
  • "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."
  • "The product is expensive."
  • "Barracuda licensing model is good."
  • More Barracuda Email Protection Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Having information stolen by a hacker would be more expensive than purchasing a license."
  • "Being able to keep the phishing campaigns out of my company has been ROI for me."
  • "Do a full feature evaluation (interactive) with a support person. That is what I did."
  • "The price is very good, based on what they deliver."
  • "One of the nice features is that the licensing model is elastic, so if you go over your license count, you can add users during your billing cycle and true-up later."
  • "There are absolutely no additional costs to the standard licensing fees. One of the wonderful pieces is that CloudGuard SaaS is all-inclusive in its licensing. There's no a-la-carte functionality. You're getting 100 percent of the product for the licensing that you're paying."
  • "The difference between [Check Point and its competitors] boiled down to money. Price-wise, Check Point was very good, it was very competitive."
  • "The pricing and licensing are always negotiable."
  • More Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Threat Explorer is an invaluable tool for me, and it plays a crucial role in helping me discern the origins of various… more »
    Top Answer:The product must provide better malware detection. The detection algorithms don't perform the way I hope they would.
    Top Answer:I don't even have details of the product's single license purchased by my company.
    Top Answer:I use the solution in my company to secure the users' environment so that there are no phishing attacks. The tool… more »
    Top Answer:The product offers good and easy integration capabilities with other products.
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    MS Defender for Office 365
    Barracuda Essentials
    Check Point CloudGuard, Check Point CloudGuard SaaS , Check Point Harmony Email & Office
    Learn More
    Overview

    Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is a comprehensive security solution designed to protect organizations against advanced threats in their email, collaboration, and productivity environments. It combines the power of Microsoft's threat intelligence, machine learning, and behavioral analytics to provide real-time protection against phishing, malware, ransomware, and other malicious attacks.

    With Microsoft Defender for Office 365, organizations can safeguard their email communication by detecting and blocking malicious links, attachments, and unsafe email content. It employs advanced anti-phishing capabilities to identify and prevent sophisticated phishing attacks that attempt to steal sensitive information or compromise user credentials.

    This solution also offers robust protection against malware and ransomware. It leverages machine learning algorithms to analyze email attachments and URLs in real-time, identifying and blocking malicious content before it reaches users' inboxes. Additionally, it provides advanced threat-hunting capabilities, allowing security teams to proactively investigate and respond to potential threats.

    Microsoft Defender for Office 365 goes beyond email protection and extends its security features to other collaboration tools like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. It scans files and documents stored in these platforms, ensuring that they are free from malware and other malicious content. It also provides visibility into user activities, helping organizations detect and mitigate insider threats.

    Furthermore, this solution offers rich reporting and analytics capabilities, providing organizations with insights into their security posture and threat landscape. It enables security administrators to monitor and manage security incidents, track trends, and take proactive measures to enhance their overall security posture.

    The popularity of Microsoft 365 means criminals test and design their attacks to bypass its native security features. And that means you need additional layers of defense. With Advanced Threat Protection enabled, Barracuda uses multiple layers of detection, including signature, static, and behavioral analysis, along with CPU-emulation sandboxing to accurately detect and block zero-hour targeted attacks and ransomware.

    Traditional email gateways use static rules and policies—reputation analysis, block lists, and malicious payloads—to determine if an email is malicious.

    Barracuda protects your Microsoft 365 inbox against evasive threats with a powerful AI engine that learns the unique communication patterns within your organization through access to internal and historical emails. Once it understands what legitimate emails looks like for each user, it can detect anomalies that signal malicious intent. This context-based detection is more effective at blocking targeted attacks, which are designed to bypass traditional rule-based email security.

    Check Point Harmony Email and Office is a cloud-based software offering complete protection to stop malware attacks through emails. The software is designed to provide protection for organizations using Office 365, G Suite, Google Workspace, and all other collaboration and file-sharing apps. Access permissions can be granted and custom policies can be defined for any user of choice.

    Check Point Harmony Email and Office identifies and blocks advanced malware, phishing, and ransomware attacks in real time before they reach the user’s inbox. In turn, this also helps protect sensitive business data from breaches. Harmony Email and Office was the first solution to implement machine learning, API, and AI for email security, and will ultimately prevent any attempts at account takeover via agentless multi-factor authentication.

    What is Complete Protection?

    Check Point Harmony Email and Office offers a superior catch rate for collaboration apps and cloud email with their API-based solution that detects attacks that other solutions miss, including account takeover, supply chain attacks, ransomware, and BEC. The complete protection offers:

    • Malware Protection - Recognized by NSS Labs as “most effective in breach prevention,” the solution leverages technologies to bring clean files to users within 1.5 seconds. In addition, enterprises can be safer as the solution prevents malicious messages and files from reaching the user’s inbox.
    • Data Leakage Protection - Any confidential or sensitive information will be marked and have a classified suffix added to the end of the message or file to help keep those materials safe. Those files are encrypted, and the user will be alerted to any attempted breach of those messages.
    • Phishing Protection - Before advanced phishing attacks reach the end user, Harmony Email and Office detects and blocks them, including outbound, inbound, and internal communications.
    • Account Takeover Protection - After a user connects their cloud app, the solution captures the user's history and creates a profile and a custom threat profile. In the event of a suspected account takeover, threat intelligence is leveraged through millions of Check Point-secured gateways and endpoints and is blocked.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Check Point Harmony Email and Office offers a revolutionary prevention solution to stop malware attacks through emails. Users particularly like its visibility and the ability to protect sensitive business data.

    David U., a CISO at IMC companies, notes, "It provides visibility of events, what's going on with the environment, what we're missing with our other solution, and the user behavior."

    Mantu S., a senior technology architect at Incedo Inc., writes, "We are able to protect sensitive business data and maintain regulatory compliance with advanced data leak prevention (DLP)."

    Sample Customers
    Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is trusted by companies such as Ithaca College.
    ACT Government, Acumen Group, AGIP, Delta Dental Plans Association, Desai/Nasr Consulting Engineers, Inc., Equinox Information Systems
    Helvetia, Denham Capital, Daymark Solutions, Neopharm Group
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company16%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    Logistics Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company25%
    Security Firm25%
    Construction Company25%
    Educational Organization13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Construction Company7%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Real Estate/Law Firm7%
    REVIEWERS
    Energy/Utilities Company17%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Security Firm10%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Real Estate/Law Firm6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business42%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise42%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise51%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business57%
    Midsize Enterprise36%
    Large Enterprise7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business41%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise41%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business50%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise32%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise46%
    Buyer's Guide
    Barracuda Email Protection vs. Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Barracuda Email Protection vs. Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    770,394 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Barracuda Email Protection is ranked 15th in Email Security with 13 reviews while Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is ranked 7th in Email Security with 47 reviews. Barracuda Email Protection is rated 8.8, while Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Barracuda Email Protection writes "Set-it-and-forget-it type of product that doesn't require a lot of management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration writes "Has a user-friendly dashboard, a great anti-phishing algorithm, and sandboxing for testing". Barracuda Email Protection is most compared with TitanHQ SpamTitan, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Abnormal Security, Fortinet FortiMail and Mimecast Email Security, whereas Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration is most compared with Avanan, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Mimecast Email Security, Cisco Secure Email and Fortinet FortiMail Cloud. See our Barracuda Email Protection vs. Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration report.

    See our list of best Email Security vendors.

    We monitor all Email Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.