We performed a comparison between Barracuda Email Security Gateway and Microsoft Defender for Office 365 based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Barracuda comes out on top in this comparison. Our reviewers agree that Barracuda is powerful and fairly priced. In addition, it has excellent customer support.
"The performance is good."
"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."
"One advantage is its immediate deployment capability. So the fast speed to deploy is a big plus point."
"All features it provides on the cloud environment are very, very useful, including the antivirus that is enabled on it."
"We find the email security to be valuable."
"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 can effectively combat phishing attacks, block spam, provide confirmation, and ensure operational manageability with a strong focus on product stability."
"The most valuable feature is the Antispam services, which are the basic services of spam device"
"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 for 365 is a comprehensive cloud-based solution. The value of the cloud is that you aren't alone. Threat intelligence and analytics are shared in the cloud. We don't have to find the solution alone. If you face an unknown threat with traditional solutions like Trend Micro and Symantec, you need to open a case and send your information to them to analyze forensically and identify the source of the attack."
"Threat Explorer is one of the features that I very much like because it is a real-time report that allows you to identify, analyze, and trace security attacks."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable feature is its performance."
"There are several features that I consider valuable."
"The product's scalability is good."
"Microsoft Defender for Office 365's most valuable features are safe attachments and safe links."
"The initial setup is straightforward. You just add the license, click it, and then you can set up the rules. It is quite simple."
"Barracuda Email Security Gateway can improve reporting and anti-spam. The anti-spam engine is not working well. We are seeing a lot of problems where spam is going through the gateway. Additionally, access privilege should be given to the IT support, because they don't have a lot of privileges. We are forced to give our IT support administrative access in order to clear and deliver emails and this should not be happening."
"There are limited administration controls that should be improved."
"Artificial intelligence improvement could be used to help block spam and phishing mail that is directly delivered to users."
"There are some times when legit emails are trapped on Barracuda and we are unable to get that information unless we actually log on to the network to find out."
"The pricing is a little bit high, and it is causing the company to rethink renewal. If they could lower the pricing, that would be ideal."
"Barracuda's spam database isn't on par with its competitors. Users complain about the spam email they're receiving, and we report the issue. Barracuda said they are going to update their system to block the malicious email we received, but we're still getting the same spam. The signatures are not in their database. They need to update their spam signatures because spam is bypassing Barracuda."
"The downsides of the solution stem from the fact that it is an expensive product, and one may see too many false positives when using it, making them both areas where improvements are required."
"Barracuda should have a sandbox feature in the appliances."
"In one of the reports I can get the exact place where a vulnerable file resides. But for that, I need to explicitly go into the device and check. If they could include that file part in the report, without my having to go to the device itself, that would help."
"There is room for improvement in terms of reporting."
"Too many false positives and lacks an accurate capability to detect malicious SharePoint sites."
"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."
"They have moved features from one console to another. Things have been moved around in the interface and it takes me time to find where certain features are."
"Microsoft wants its well-paying customers to finish testing some of its half-baked products, find bugs, and report bugs back to Microsoft's team, which is a little frustrating for those who have to manage it and roll it up to thousands of people across the organization."
"The UI needs to be more user-friendly."
"The XDR dashboard has room for improvement."
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Barracuda Email Security Gateway is ranked 2nd in Secure Email Gateway (SEG) with 51 reviews while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is ranked 1st in Email Security with 41 reviews. Barracuda Email Security Gateway is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Barracuda Email Security Gateway writes "Robust email protection with advanced features such as effective spam filtering, virus and malware defense, phishing protection and high scalability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Defender for Office 365 writes "Allows for easy reporting of problems, valuable anti-phishing, and anti-malware support". Barracuda Email Security Gateway is most compared with Fortinet FortiMail, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Proofpoint Email Protection, Cisco Secure Email and Check Point Anti-Spam and Email Security Software Blade, whereas Microsoft Defender for Office 365 is most compared with Proofpoint Email Protection, Mimecast Email Security, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP), Cisco Secure Email and Microsoft Defender for Business. See our Barracuda Email Security Gateway vs. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 report.
We monitor all Secure Email Gateway (SEG) 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.