Abnormal Security specializes in identifying uncommon attacks, particularly advanced phishing and social engineering attempts. Their AI analyzes email behavior patterns within your organization to detect anomalies that might indicate malicious intent. Barracuda Email Protection offers a multi-layered approach that includes traditional methods like spam filtering, malware detection, and sandboxing. Users find Barracuda effective in blocking various threats and it can also protect against phishing, but its focus is broader. Barracuda's pricing is valued for its flexibility, while Abnormal Security is praised for its strong customer service. Integrations and reporting features were areas for improvement in both products.
The summary above is based on 24 interviews we conducted recently with Barracuda Email Protection and Abnormal Security users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"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."
"The email protection is excellent, especially in terms of anti-phishing policies."
"The two main features that prove most beneficial for us are URL scanning and attachment scanning."
"The basic features are okay and I'm satisfied with the Defender."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable features are safe attachments and safe links."
"Microsoft Defender has a feature to protect each and every attachment. Even if it's an encrypted attachment, it will check for any potential threats."
"I like its investigation capabilities, as that is what is most important to me. It is fairly simple with a user-friendly interface."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365 helps people to work remotely. It is a secure solution. We don't need to use our company's computers or get VPN connections to the networks. I can control how they share screens and what they send to the devices. It keeps our organizations confidential and sensitive information safe."
"The features that appeal to me most are the combination of auto-remediation and Detection 360."
"What I like about Abnormal Security is that it notifies me if any of my partners or suppliers are experiencing a security breach by analyzing their database and identifying potential cyber threats."
"One of the things that I love about them is that the setup and installation are super easy. All you do is give them access to your Microsoft 365 tenant, and through APIs, they are able to do their work. They are doing all this through APIs, so you do not have to install the software and take a month to get it all set up to even see the value of the solution. You could be up and running in less than an hour."
"It does some really cool stuff that other tools aren't doing. We found it to be really effective, and the AI/ML functionality is really what differentiates them."
"Ease of use is undoubtedly one of the most valuable features of Abnormal Security."
"Their ability to take things out of the mailbox and catch things much faster than users is excellent."
"I have never encountered any stability issues with Abnormal."
"Initial auto-remediation allows us to auto-remediate before the email lands in the end user's inbox for a split second."
"The most valuable aspect includes attempts to spoof or compromise domains from external sources."
"I'm quite satisfied with the graphical user interface for Barracuda products."
"The most valuable features are security and ease of use."
"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."
"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 most valuable features of Barracuda Email Protection are flexibility and customization."
"There is room for improvement in terms of reporting."
"They can improve their security in a way where a customer can know if all their attachments are safe or not to open through a report. The solution does its job perfectly, but it never reports to the customer whether those attachments have been stopped before or not."
"The company should focus on adding threats that the solution is currently unable to detect."
"The XDR dashboard has room for improvement."
"There needs to be an improvement in integrating the product to work across multiple operating systems, and to have better support for non-Microsoft file types."
"There's room for improvement regarding the time frame for retrieving emails."
"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."
"The phishing and spam filters could use some improvement."
"The ideal scenario would be for Abnormal Security to work in tandem with Microsoft to analyze incoming emails."
"There could be room for improvement in enhancing integration with other cybersecurity tools."
"The biggest pain point for us is the lack of support for on-premise email systems."
"I, as such, do not have anything that I do not like or would like to add, but you could argue that because they are doing it API-based, there is a chance that something could slip through temporarily before they are able to pull it out. In theory, it could happen just because of the nature of the system. They are not in line with the delivery of the mail. They are kind of asynchronous, which is a pro as well as a con. If it is synchronous, then I know it would always stop them, but because it is asynchronous, things could get through temporarily or because of some system issues on the Microsoft side or their side. It is the nature of the beast, but it is a little bit of a con."
"One feature I'd love to see is outbound scanning."
"When we're working on something as engineers, and we find an idea or a method of doing something that would be greatly improved by doing it another way, there should be an ability for me to click the ideas button, type in an idea that I have, and submit it to a product review team or developers to have them think through the process a little bit more."
"I would like to have the ability to customize the auto-remediation feature."
"The pricing for academic institutions and student mailboxes is challenging."
"There is room for improvement, particularly in reaching out to technical support during deployment."
"The solution's reporting mechanism is a little poor and could be improved."
"The solution's graphical user interface (GUI) could be improved visually."
"They could simplify the licensing and the pricing."
"The platform's pricing needs improvement."
"Barracuda Essentials can improve by continually adding more features."
"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."
"Sometimes it is somewhat laggy, especially on the Archiver side. It should have improved performance on their Message Archiver."
More Microsoft Defender for Office 365 Pricing and Cost Advice →
Abnormal Security is ranked 9th in Email Security with 8 reviews while Barracuda Email Protection is ranked 15th in Email Security with 13 reviews. Abnormal Security is rated 9.6, while Barracuda Email Protection is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Abnormal Security writes "Provides comprehensive email security management, effective in detecting a wide range of email threats". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Barracuda Email Protection writes "Set-it-and-forget-it type of product that doesn't require a lot of management". Abnormal Security is most compared with Mimecast Email Security, Egress Intelligent Email Security, Cloudflare Area 1 Email Security, Cisco Secure Email and Tessian Enforcer, whereas Barracuda Email Protection is most compared with Check Point Harmony Email & Collaboration, TitanHQ SpamTitan, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Mimecast Email Security and Fortinet FortiMail. See our Abnormal Security vs. Barracuda Email Protection report.
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