Barracuda ESG (discontinued) vs. Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)
Score 6.6 out of 10
N/A
Barracuda ESG were physical or virtual appliances designed to protect email servers from spam, virus, spoofing, phishing and spyware attacks. The product line is discontinued.N/A
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense provides protection against email threats that compromise an organization’s brand and operations. Its advanced threat detection capabilities uncover known, emerging and targeted threats. And it expands the scope of organizations' defenses to detect dangerous threats and rapidly search for and remediate threats across security controls. Secure Email Threat Defense's Artificial Intelligence and machine…N/A
Pricing
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Features
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Secure Email Gateway
Comparison of Secure Email Gateway features of Product A and Product B
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)
7.3
Ratings
13% below category average
Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
8.4
Ratings
1% above category average
Anti-malware8.00 Ratings8.70 Ratings
Customizability4.40 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Data Loss Protection9.00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Threat Detection7.50 Ratings8.90 Ratings
Sandboxing9.00 Ratings8.10 Ratings
End-to-End Encryption7.00 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Management Tools6.00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Small Businesses
Zoho Mail
Zoho Mail
Score 9.3 out of 10
Zoho Mail
Zoho Mail
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.4 out of 10
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.4 out of 10
Avanan
Avanan
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
6.0
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.4
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense
Likelihood to Recommend
Good combination when using their other products like an incident response. When using automated workflows, this makes creating sender policies a breeze. Unfortunately, this can also be done too well as it may filter out valid emails and to resend or place them back into users' mailbox isn't an easy thing to do even if you attempt to resend through the Email Security Gateway.
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With Cisco Secure Email, we can easily protect our business email system again all manner of attacks. In addition, we are able to send emails securely thanks to encryption and decryption features. It's, therefore, ideal for businesses that value email privacy, such as those in the accounting industry, hospitals, and law firms, among other users.
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Pros
  • Stops unwanted emails coming through to your inbox, it does this by holding them in a 'quarantine' folder for you to then check and allow or deny.
  • Protects against phishing and ransomware attacks.
  • Stops employees clicking on dangerous links in emails by putting them in a secure place.
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  • Manages Junk Mail Well-We configured and tested our configuration to filter out the majority of junk mail hitting our inboxes.
  • Manages Graymail-We configured and tested our Cisco ETD for graymail filtering and reduced the amount of unwanted advertising and other legitimate emails.
  • Creating unique policies that were tailored to block or allow emails from certain senders.
  • Stopped malicious email traffic (e.g., malicious attachments and links) with rules for identifying and stripping potentially malicious attachments or links.
  • Allows easy configuration for other email security measures such as SPF, DMARC and DKIM.
  • Cisco engineers provide an annual free security health check. We took advantage of several security health checks where Cisco certified engineers go over the security setting of our Cisco ETD. We were provided a written report that highlighted strengths and weaknesses of our Cisco ETD setup.
  • Monitoring email traffic flow is almost overwhelming with the amount of information you can obtain from the portal. This gives valuable information to IT staff in terms of volume and type of emails the company is receiving.
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Cons
  • The appliance has a feature to block all office macros. This is a great feature but only has an on/off setting. I would like to see the additional of allowing exclusions for users who need to receive office macros.
  • The feature for email encryption is great and allows us to not require an additional product or service for this. Unfortunately this is similar to the office macro feature and does not allow exclusions. The setting automatically detects information like credit cards, social security numbers, and other sensitive information. I have a user who works with Japanese companies. Japanese phone numbers apparently trigger the SSN filter. I wish I could put an exclusion in for this recipient or sender.
  • I wish the appliance had an auto firmware update option. Where non major releases would be automatically installed.
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  • The web interface is definitely dated
  • The software updates to the user interface and the documentation online are not congruent. Some docs are old and information is lacking to make changes
  • The email filtering and email search features are really dated. And other tools are more user friendly
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
There is a 50/50 chance that we will renew. We are in the middle of moving from on-prem to the cloud so we may not need it once we are fully migrated.
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Usability
Setting up the Barracuda for use with Microsoft 365 provides issues that Barracuda seems to have no fix for. I mentioned these issues to their support, because I am constantly reminded of them by their system, and I was told that those errors are normal for our setup and to ignore them which is frustrating to me.
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Good interface, easy to use and set up. If there were any issues, there is very good documentation and videos that one can follow for additional setup and best practices. As typical with most Cisco solutions, there are more features than needed for our purposes but good to know they are there in case of future needs
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Reliability and Availability
Availability is robust and flawless. This is a non-issue, its always up & running and fail-over protection is available for restarts or upgrades.
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Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense's availability is great and reliable when you need it most. We haven't had any noticeable outages or issues.
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Performance
The WebUI is the only piece I find lacking on the Barracuda ESK. Its is not the fastest and is fairly utilitarian in its approach. The Outlook plug-in, while not in wide use here, causes zero slowdown in Outlook or the Barracuda ESG.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Barracuda Email Security Gateway support is great at responding and escalating cases when needed. Timeliness is key when dealing with email attacks, spoofing or malware. Barracuda also has great resources for end-user training as our end users are our first line of defense in combatting attacks on our company. Training end-users pays off in time spent dealing with any email attacks
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Cisco always provides good support for all of their solutions. As usual, Cisco support is top notch, from their initial sales teams to the post support, we have always felt comfortable with using Cisco solutions. Their documentation is also very good, frequent updates to the documents with feature enhancements and support notes. All around very good suppot
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
The implementation went well, no issues or problems to report.
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Alternatives Considered
Barracuda integrates well with Office 365 and mail flow is great. It was the first solution we found that was part of a greater suite to fit all the requirements we had. With the Email Security gateway being in the cloud, it required no extra hardware but also nothing new installed on an endpoint as some solutions require.
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Cisco SETD, with a broad deployment and full integration with Microsoft 365 gives us a strong protection, especially where we can leverage its strengths: Microsoft‑365 integration, mailbox remediation, policy enforcement, and your visibility across Cisco tools.


Proofpoint is better around user awareness (warning tags etc.), and continuity/archiving. Considering that we have a full Cisco stack, choosing Proofpoint would come with higher cost, learning curve, possible redundancy of features, licensing complexity.
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Return on Investment
  • The cost of ESS for our organization is tiny compared to the amount of money we would lose if even one virus-laden PDF slipped through
  • Ignoring genuine malware/phishing, the cost of ESS for our organization is tiny compared to the amount of money we save by blocking regular spam (so employees don't ever see it)
  • From an administrator's perspective, putting the reins in the hands of our employees so they can look at their own quarantine (and leave IT out of it) has saved us 💵DOLLA 💸DOLLA💵BILLS 💸Y'ALL💵
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  • Up time is as close to 100% as you can get
  • Tuning is pretty straight forward and Cisco support is there to help with special tweaks and filter options. At no charge
  • Support access is pretty easy to get
  • Email threat, filtering, and geolocation verification is updated very regularly
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ScreenShots

Cisco Secure Email Threat Defense Screenshots

Screenshot of an Impact Report showing efficacy metrics and ROI indicatorsScreenshot of a detailed view of phishing messagesScreenshot of the dashboard