Barracuda Email Protection vs. Sophos Email

I would definitely recommend it due to the decent pricing. I wish the MS built-in M365 tools were better, but Barracuda does a good job of taking their place. For industries that need DLP on their email, like healthcare, banking, and education, Barracuda provides a reliable product for a good cost. The additional services you get, malware/AV filtering, URL filtering, spam protection, business continuity, those are all icing on the cake. The only issues we've ever really had with them is that it will sometimes take a back/forth string of emails and decide randomly to encrypt it, so what was a flowing benign conversation is now locked behind a wall for recipients. As the sender, you have no idea when it's going to decide to do this and have to remember to tag emails with a decrypt tag long before it happens or face the consequences

Incentivized

The Sophos email solution is a good fit for my organization which is a mid-size resort with 200 users. Sophos email has revealed unwanted emails that were getting through our built in Microsoft email security scanning and policies so having this extra layer was a no brainier. With that we were able to focus on the bad stuff and even tweak our products with this information from Sophos email.

Incentivized

• Barracuda Essentials Spam Filtering works and it is very easy to add or remove senders from the Spam filter lists.
• Barracuda Essentials provides excellent protection from Phishing and other Malware.
• Barracuda Essentials email encryption is so easy to use and easy to setup. Our users love it.

Incentivized

• We could customize it to have a certain level of workflow. We manage to enforce certain email (based on key-phrases) to be quarantined before send it to the recipient. And the email needs to be approved (manually) before being released.
• For certain type (using regex) of email, we will encrypt it if it's sent outside our organization domain.
• Scalable

Incentivized

• The product is pretty solid so I am not sure how it can be improved. One thing I noticed recently, I am not getting the emails back from Sentinel when I send in a "miss". Used to be I got an email back saying "sorry we missed this, we are improving." That does happen anymore, so I am assuming that when I send a miss, the AI is getting better.
• I would expand this to cover all kinds of email fraud like ransomware and spam rather than creating another product.

• I would love to see tips integrated into the user interface from the management side to allow for easier dissection of email headers. This would allow lower level admins that may work at smaller companies to better understand the information presented.

Incentivized

Although cost competitive, we still feel like we are not digging deep enough to train our staff. We have little to no way other than digging through reports that have not proven to be adequately documented (hey you, Barracuda campaign reports) to identify and require users to take more training who have not passed their requirements.

Incentivized

It was easy to use and easy to implement. You don't need previous knowledge on the products, after we got this up and running, it took us hours to put everything together. The transition was easy and seamless.

Incentivized

Regarding usability, we like it to be an easy solution to implement and configure on the server. Routine backups are made frequently and reports are issued for control and analysis by information security teams. It has great integration with the cloud and encryption.

Incentivized

It's mostly great and for policies and features, it does everything we would ask it to and more. The only thing keeping it from being a 10 is the lack of granularity in the reporting, which is actually an issue within Sophos Central as a whole. The ability to drill down from dashboards into accurate, detailed data would be very helpful at times.

Incentivized

I have not had to use customer support yet which goes to show the effectiveness of the program. It also shows how easy the program is to use for the average person with no experience using this type of program. Our IT department also does a great job at teaching us to detect emails with malware that in combination with this software issues rarely arise even though we have over 500 employees.

Incentivized

Support is slow to respond. They call back outside of normal business hours despite clearly being advised when they should call. They try to BS you that the platform is working properly although there is hard evidence to the contrary. Once you get to senior level of support they agree that the product is incapable of performing properly in its current iteration.

It was "stupid easy" from the technical side.

We have used several email solutions over the years, some were bought and killed off by larger companies. Barracuda Email Protection offers a very complete solution and has all the tools that we were looking for, and our MSP offered it.

Incentivized

I have only tried Sophos Email, and I find it to be a very useful tool, as it protects against information leakage such as fraudulent emails, cloud sandboxing and quarantine, which are essential functions and the product works excellent.

• This tool was supplied free with out Email Security, so its come at no cost
• This tool has helped us meet requirements by our insurance to train users on the risks of phishing
• However, the dated interface slows down what should be seamless adoption

Incentivized

• Sophos Email has been protecting our users, including the administrative branch, who are the target of attacks most frequently.
• Every month Sophos Email stops about 100,000 malicious emails. We calculate that if these attacks have saved the company time, it prevents us from having a lot of support staff to attend to the cases.

Incentivized