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Barracuda ESS - A good low cost alternative for email filtering
March 14, 2018

Barracuda ESS - A good low cost alternative for email filtering

Jeff Daniels | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Barracuda Email Security Service

When we decided to switch to Office 365 we decided we wanted to add an additional service for email security. All of our incoming mail goes to the Barrcauda ESS first, before going to out Office 365 tenant for delivery. The email for all our users goes through the service.
  • Ease of implementation - Barracuda ESS was amazingly simple to set up. We had it up and running in under a day.
  • Cost effective - Barracuda ESS is very reasonable in terms of price compared to some of the other available options.
  • Good filtering - Barracuda ESS does a good job of filtering out unwanted and/or dangerous email.
  • False positives - While small, use of Barracuda ESS does result in some false positives. Sometimes it is not clear why a particular message was flagged.
  • Configuration - Some of the features of Barracuda ESS are a little obscure in their configuration. Barracuda has made improvements in this since we started using the service.
  • Interface - The interface is a little cluttered.
  • We evaluated several services when we were looking for a cloud based filtering program. Barracuda was clearly the most economical. Our cost was about 1/3 of what it would have been had we gone with our second choice.
  • Our users are more productive since they spend less time wading though unwanted emails. Barracuda is filtering out about 97% of emails sent to us, albeit with a few false positives.
Mimecast is an excellent, versatile and full-featured product. However, it was significantly more costly than Barracuda ESS. If you need some of the advanced features from Mimecast and are able to justify the cost based upon those, you will not be disappointed. Microsoft offers add-ons to their Office 365 product, but we found the cost and efficacy of those add-ons not positive enough to consider using them.
Barracuda Email Security Service (ESS) is very well suited for the small and medium business market where you do not require advanced features. Other services provide more functionality in terms of encryption and archiving, especially with respect to legal requirements for mail retention and holding pens for mail if your delivery service fails.