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Barracuda Essentials

Barracuda Essentials

Overview

What is Barracuda Essentials?

Barracuda Essentials is an email security platform designed to protect users and businesses from volumetric threats like malware and spam, as well advanced threats like targeted spear phishing and ransomware, and provides email archiving and data protection from corruption and…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Barracuda Essentials has become a trusted solution for organizations looking to protect their email infrastructure from advanced threats …
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Highly Recommend

9 out of 10
June 24, 2021
We utilise Barracuda Essentials across the whole business. Email spam, cloud to cloud back up, mailbox and 365 archiving. We also use the …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 7 features
  • Anti-malware (16)
    10.0
    100%
  • Threat Detection (16)
    9.0
    90%
  • Management Tools (16)
    9.0
    90%
  • Customizability (15)
    5.0
    50%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is Barracuda Essentials?

Barracuda Essentials is an email security platform designed to protect users and businesses from volumetric threats like malware and spam, as well advanced threats like targeted spear phishing and ransomware, and provides email archiving and data protection from corruption and deletion with cloud…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.barracuda.com/products/esse…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Features

Secure Email Gateway

Secure email gateway software prevents the transmission of emails that contravene company policy or contain malware, phishing attacks, spam or other unwanted emails

6.6
Avg 8.4
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Product Details

What is Barracuda Essentials?

Email is the leading threat vector for ransomware, phishing, data theft, and other advanced threats. The Barracuda Essentials cloud-based service is designed to make email safe for business with advanced threat protection, tamper-proof archiving, and data protection.

Barracuda Essentials Features

Secure Email Gateway Features

  • Supported: Anti-malware
  • Supported: Customizability
  • Supported: Data Loss Protection
  • Supported: Threat Detection
  • Supported: Sandboxing
  • Supported: End-to-End Encryption
  • Supported: Management Tools

Barracuda Essentials Video

Barracuda Essentials

Barracuda Essentials Competitors

Barracuda Essentials Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Barracuda Essentials is an email security platform designed to protect users and businesses from volumetric threats like malware and spam, as well advanced threats like targeted spear phishing and ransomware, and provides email archiving and data protection from corruption and deletion with cloud backup and recovery of emails and files, data leak prevention and encryption.

SpamTitan Email Security are common alternatives for Barracuda Essentials.

Reviewers rate Anti-malware highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Barracuda Essentials are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(45)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Barracuda Essentials has become a trusted solution for organizations looking to protect their email infrastructure from advanced threats and intrusion. With its user-friendly interface and robust features, the software has gained confidence from users in various sectors and is widely used to safeguard against email attacks and invasion. By serving as a front-end gateway, Barracuda Essentials allows users to easily view messages caught in anti-spam or anti-virus queues, giving them high confidence in the cleanliness of their incoming and outgoing emails. The software effectively monitors all inbound and outbound emails, scanning them for phishing attempts, malware, spam, viruses, and even protecting URL links with typosquatting protection.

One of the key use cases of Barracuda Essentials is its capability to reduce the amount of viruses and spam emails in educational institutions. For instance, a local community college has implemented the software to save countless hours for their IT department by preventing the influx of harmful content. With features like email SPAM filtering, encryption, archiving, and extended backup for 365 mailboxes, Barracuda Essentials offers comprehensive solutions that cater to the entire organization's needs. Additionally, the software simplifies content filtering and blacklisting, making it easy for IT departments to locate and release quarantined emails. Users receive a daily digest of blocked mail, enabling them to efficiently manage their quarantined emails at their own level.

In professional environments, Barracuda Essentials has proved to be a crucial product surpassing previous email security solutions. The software's ability to integrate seamlessly with Office 365 makes it highly valued among businesses. It not only enhances email security by protecting users from spam, phishing attacks, and malware but also eliminates the burden of upgrading on-premise antispam solutions. With its easy implementation process and automatic evolution to counter sophisticated spam techniques, Barracuda Essentials ensures continuous data security in cloud backups. This comprehensive product provides inbound and outbound email filtering while reducing spam and phishing attacks, flagging any malicious activities. It is widely used across entire organizations, including multiple branches and remote workers. Moreover, users have found great value in the software's ability to block malware, spam, spear-phishing attempts, and ransomware. With its additional products such as archive, backup, and sentential, Barracuda Essentials offers a complete system that integrates well with Office 365, enhancing email security and productivity.

Easy Deployment: Many users have found the deployment process of the product to be easy and straightforward. It has been praised for its simplicity, allowing users to quickly get up and running without any hassle.

Excellent Protection Against Online Threats: The product has received positive feedback for its ability to protect against various online threats such as SPAM, phishing, ransomware, and malware. Users have appreciated the comprehensive protection it provides, giving them peace of mind while using their email.

First-Rate Technical Support: Users have had a positive experience with the technical support provided by the company. They describe it as first-rate and efficient, highlighting the helpfulness and expertise of the support team in resolving any issues or concerns that arise.

Improvements Needed: Some users have suggested that the documentation and reports of the product could be improved, as they found them lacking in clarity and detail. They feel that more comprehensive and user-friendly documentation would greatly enhance their experience.

Billing System Integration: Several reviewers have mentioned that the billing system could be better integrated with Office 365, allowing for month-to-month adjustments per customer. This would provide more flexibility and convenience for managing billing, resulting in a smoother workflow.

Email Issue Resolution: A more convenient way to resolve email issues is desired by some users. They suggest adding a feature where they can click on a link to directly access the relevant area, making it easier to address and resolve any email-related problems without unnecessary steps or confusion.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-16 of 16)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Barracuda Essentials provides inbound and outbound email filtering to help reduce spam and phishing attacks that reach end user mailboxes. Uses a mix of SPF / Dkim filtering along with a sender reputation score to help identify patterns. Can also be used to rate limit outbound emails to flag up any malicious activity
  • Email Filtering
  • Spam Filtering
  • Simple Interface
  • complex to setup advanced features
  • reports not easy to use
  • poor intergraiton to phishline
Good add on for office 365 , good guides abailble to get setup to provide filtering quickly. Can give users the ability to approve their own blocked mail or set to only allow admins to release. Keeps a good audit log that details every action that is taken by support staff.
Gabriel Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The company acquired several security and backup solutions from Barracuda over these 4 years. We were looking for a solution to protect against advanced threats, spam, corporate email hacking and Office 365 and Barracuda Essentials was really a very positive protection surprise. The initial scenario was just the IT sector, and over the months and confidence in the tool has spread to other sectors and today almost everyone uses this protection tool in e-mail against any attack and invasion.
  • Easy deployment.
  • Protection against SPAM, phishing, ransonware, malware.
  • First-rate and efficient technical support.
  • Sand-box with lots of protection.
  • Documentation can be improved.
  • Reports can be improved.
The Barracuda Essentials solution is definitely a great alternative to network security and especially corporate email to prevent employees from clicking on malicious links, spam, phishing, trojans and ransonware. The solution today is implemented in almost all sectors of the company and we have control of everything and good protection guaranteeing principles of compliance and security.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Barracuda Essentials is being used by our entire organization. It monitors all emails inbound from [Microsoft] Exchange, as well as all outbound emails. Inbound emails are scanned for phishing, malware, spam, viruses etc., as well as any URL links are protected and have typosquatting protection. We have high confidence that our incoming and outgoing emails are clean.
  • Advanced Threat Protection on Attachments
  • Malware Protection
  • Spam and Virus Detection
  • DoS Attacks
  • I would like to see the ability to click on a link to immediately go to the area to resolve any email issues (eg: Intent Analysis issues, Sender Policy issues, etc.)
If you want total protection for your Office365 / Exchange email system, this is the way to go. Spam, viruses, malware, link protection, attachment scanning are all included. It takes a short while to get used to how to resolve certain issues, but once you know, it becomes easy.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Barracuda Essentials is used across our entire organization. We currently have branches in MA, ,SC, CA and Vietnam with remote workers in India and Malaysia. In this day of spamming and scamming our firewall addresses our business needs to keep many countries active while blocking others. We love that Barracuda devices are intuitively decreasing the need for repetitive entries.
  • Blocking entire countries is Key for us
  • Comprehensive Spam filtering is intuitive reducing the occurrences of spoofing and malware at the source
  • Support Is available 24x7
  • Sandbox in invaluable when determining if an email is legit or a malware attempt
  • The Ability to adjust bandwidth easily when email Archiving to the Cloud
Any business that has end users would benefit from Barracuda Essentials, employee training is key as they are our last line of defense when suspicious emails come in. Our training has eliminated many casualties as our staff now checks with IT when in doubt. If you have a small office where users are knowledgeable in header info you may not need Barracuda Essentials.
June 24, 2021

Highly Recommend

David Price | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We utilise Barracuda Essentials across the whole business. Email spam, cloud to cloud back up, mailbox and 365 archiving. We also use the PhishLine product to test end user against spam emails and provide training where required.
  • Email Archive, captures all sent and received email.
  • Forensics to strange or unusual login's.
  • 365 backup, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, Outlook.
  • Intergrade PhishLine into other products
One stop solution to secure and backup your 365 estate.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We migrated from on-premise antispam towards Barracuda Essentials. This saved us from the burden of upgrading the antispam solution. The antispam is quite easy to implement and contains everything you would expect of a professional product. But most of all, it evolves automatically and continues to stop sophisticated spam techniques without the need to put a lot of effort in it.
  • Set and forget.
  • Configurable quarantine reports.
  • Cloud based.
  • Speed of portal is quite slow.
  • Quarantine reports are schedule based and not on the spot itself.
  • Advanced content filtering is quite complex at first.
Once set up it is quite set and forget. It just works, stops mail that shouldn't arrive and all for a reasonable price.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our previous email security was through Microsoft's Office 365. This was deficient in many ways. Far too many phishing attempts and spam emails were making it through their filters. Microsoft's safe sender list is a joke, they decide what is worth considering as safe regardless of what you say. Barracuda Essentials was a welcome and well worth [adding] to our security. We have felt far more secure since implementation.
  • Secure
  • Easy to use
  • Easy to implement
  • Customer support
  • Reporting could be better
.
Neisha Pander | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Barracuda Essentials is used campus-wide at our local community college. It was implemented to try and lower the amount of viruses and spam email that our IT department was spending countless hours trying to correct.
  • Blocks suspicious emails sent from outside our organization.
  • Useful spam blocker tool for unwanted junk mail.
  • Protection of important data sent inside and outside our organization.
  • I think it could do a better job at grabbing that unwanted spam mail. You can manually add the specific sender to your spam list.
I find it useful that Barracuda Essentials send[s] me a notification with a list of emails that the program is unsure about in order for me to check to see if the email is important. This quarantine helps me to weed out those spam emails.
Additionally, I have not had to deal with any emails containing viruses in quite some time which gives me a piece of mind and helps me to be more productive.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Barracuda Essentials is being used by all staff. We use the product with O365 to help us block malware and spam, as well as advanced threats like targeted spear phishing and ransomware.<br><br>We purchased the archive, backup and sentential products as well. Thus making a complete system that works well with O365.
  • Allows IT the ability to tweak the system as needed.
  • Dashboard is easy to use and intuitive.
  • Support staff is really good and provides quality help.
  • Once setup to your needs, you don't have to check it every day.
  • Reduces spam and malware emails quickly and you can see the difference.
  • Reports are quality and nice to share with your management team.
  • Initial setup support could be a little better.
  • Some of the blocked emails are difficult to understand why.
  • The backup and archive functions are good, just not super intuitive at first.
Barracuda Essentials is a powerful tool that is well suited for a company likes ours. We have a small IT team and put a lot of trust in our tools that we select. Once set up, the tool works and you see immediate results.
Ties in nicely with O365 as we use the Archive and Backup features as well.
Solved our need for Email Encryption.
Victor Borghouts | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
We use it ourselves and for 2 other clients at present. It's simply the best anti-spam gateway I have used, better than Trend and Mimecast and other products I used in the distant past.

As a front end gateway with a well thought out user interface, its easy to see messages from external clients that were either caught up in anti-spam or anti-virus queues and explain to end-users what happened to the email.
  • Integrated login for user management of their own spam.
  • Better filtering technology, so fewer false positives as well as less span bypassing the filter with excellent anti-spam engines and logging
  • Extremely easy to install and configure
  • Excellent message tracing for folks that say "I havent got an email I was expecting"
  • Easy to add designated users as site administrators
  • Competitively priced
  • I think billing could be better integrated to licensed users in Office 365 and go up and down month to month per customer
Excellent anti-spam gateway with the best logging display of messages I have seen. So easy to identify what happened to messages which is so important when you are the person they call when things go wrong and messages are not received. Seconds to set up. Minutes to configure.
Bill Artemik | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
We are using all the features of BE. Email SPAM filtering, email encryption and email archiving. We also support these features for our clients as part of our network security services package.
  • SPAM filtering is good.
  • Sandboxing all links is very good
  • Encryption is good
  • Encryption is always on. There's NO way to turn it off so false encryption leads to real issues. Many banks and other companies cannot read/accept encrypted email. There should be a "Do Not Encrypt" type of keyword to prevent encryption (competing products have this).
  • There's no indication an email was encrypted (like with Proofpoint or Zix mail).
  • MSP management interface needs work. You have to request licenses by email and wait. Pretty archaic today. Most competing product sites let MSP's increase/decrease licensing as needed, immediately.
We recommend it to all of our clients. It's simple to use, requires little day-to-day management and you can configure the quarantine reports to be multiple times a day (so users aren't wondering where a delayed email is).

Encryption is getting to be a daily necessity for many businesses but that doesn't mean ALL email must be encrypted. This feature needs some work (as noted already).
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Barracuda Essentials for our email security system for few months. Our company email is using Ms Exchange 2016 on-premise and we used the Symantec Messagelabs before. The 1st problem is we cannot download the Barracuda add-in for Outlook because we don't have Office 365 account ( in Office 2016). The 2nd problem is the Out of office message unable to deliver recipient's inbox, because Barracuda is sending the auto-reply message from Public account which does not trusted by recipient's server like Gmail, HSBCPB. For Gmail or office 365 users, auto-reply found in Junk, HSBCPB recipient lost the message directly as their high security settings I guess. If the sender is using Barracuda as well, the auto-reply message is undeliverable. For this problem, I raised the ticket to support / developer and I'm disappointed to heard that is known issues and no schedule to resolved it.
  • User friendly portal
  • Strong anti-spam capability
  • Cheap
  • Cloud base no other maintenance cost
  • With basic policy control by end-user
  • Responsive support
  • No time schedule to fix bugs
  • India support difficult to communicate
  • Hong Kong sales & deployment engineers are not familiar with the product
  • Without automatic monthly report
  • Many problems on non-Office 365 users
  • "Out of office" is not working on Barracuda
The application is new and many unknown issues if you select Barracuda Essentials. The support is responsive but the root problem is no patch updates to resolve the bugs.
Alex Olson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
We used Barracuda Essentials for our managed services clients for spam filtering. We easily switched between client companies to monitor for issues and manage settings and rules.
  • Filtering.
  • Threat protection.
  • Encryption.
  • Reporting.
  • Combined dashboard for MSP.
I’ve used several other filter apps and services over the years. Barracuda Essentials blows them all away for the amount of well thought out and implemented features for the cost.
Peter Robinson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Barracuda Essentials across the organization to protect the users from malicious email attacks and also to secure the data in cloud backups. It solves 3 issues in one solution - backup, protection, and reporting. All data is backed up to the cloud - that's Office365, SharePoint, and OneDrive for all users. Protects the user's inbox with a myriad of content filtering and black and whitelisting. It's simple for the IT department to find quarantined email and release it - but each user also receives a daily digest of mail blocked so this can be done at user level as well. Essentials is a product I wouldn't be without in a business environment now.
  • Email filtering.
  • Cloud backup.
  • Content filtering.
  • Reporting could be a little better.
Essentials is very well suited to the education environment - we are protecting students and staff mailboxes from malicious or suspect email content on a daily basis and Essentials makes this job a breeze.
Not sure where this product wouldn't be suited? Maybe in a home environment where the cost and infrastructure costs are prohibitive, but I would use this product in every business environment.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Barracuda Essentials is amazing! We had a need to better protect our 30 Office 365 email users from Spam, Phishing and other Malware. Barracuda Essentials solved that problem for us and also filters out Spam from our incoming email. It was so easy to get it configured and working and management is a breeze. Our users are MUCH better protected now.
  • 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.
  • The Barracuda Essentials menus are very extensive and thus can be a little complicated for some users. Maybe a little more description on some of the tabs and options?
I will recommend Barracuda Essentials to everyone I know that has a corporate email account. Barracuda Essentials is a critical piece for protecting their users from all of the Malware, Spam, Viruses and Phishing emails that are flowing around now. If you have email in a business setting, you need Barracuda Essentials to protect your users.
Derek Schroeder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Barracuda Essentials is used by everyone at the company. It is the antispam system as well as encrypted email sending system. It is also the email archiver and extended backup of 365 mailboxes service. There are several flavors of Barracuda Essentials but the "base" and most common is the antispam system that includes outbound email encryption.
  • Filtering inbound and outbound email.
  • Sandboxing potentially bad email attachments.
  • Making setup easy to configure and maintain with Office 365.
  • Unifying logins for end users to Office 365 usernames and passwords.
  • From the administrative side, unifying ALL of the components and modules can be a bit clunky.
Barracuda Essentials is a great solution for businesses of all sizes. As companies grow to become VERY large, the on-premises physical appliances might be a better price point, but it utilizes the same backbone, subscriptions, and services. All organizations in all industries should care about email filtering, email archiving, and better than the built-in backups for Office 365.
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