Barracuda ESG (discontinued) vs. Sophos Email

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
Sophos Email
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Sophos Email is presented as Predictive Cloud Email Security Powered by Artificial Intelligence designed to block spam and malware, as well as protect employees and block phishing attempts.N/A
Pricing
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Sophos Email
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Sophos Email
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Sophos Email
Features
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Sophos Email
Secure Email Gateway
Comparison of Secure Email Gateway features of Product A and Product B
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)
7.3
Ratings
14% below category average
Sophos Email
7.3
Ratings
14% below category average
Anti-malware8.00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Customizability4.40 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Data Loss Protection9.00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Threat Detection7.50 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Sandboxing9.00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
End-to-End Encryption7.00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Management Tools6.00 Ratings6.70 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Sophos Email
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)Sophos Email
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
7.5
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
1.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
6.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.4
(0 ratings)
2.8
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Barracuda ESG (discontinued)Sophos Email
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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I strongly believe that if you are looking for a product that does what it says on the box and has the capacity to keep your company safe, you should look at Sophos. They have consistently been at the top of their game and continue to provide a product that meets the ever-changing needs of the threat landscape.
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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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  • 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
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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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  • Reporting could be more granular, it's the most glaring weakness of the product.
  • The ability to drill down into data from the dashboard would be very helpful for reporting as well.
  • Reverse AD sync so when active directory users are removed, they are removed from Sophos as well would be helpful.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
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.
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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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The solution is very scalable, with a possibility to be customized; which means that Sophos Email can be configured depending on our own situation and context not on a general way. On the other hand, Sophos Email has a broad feature set; I mean, along with core spam and malware protection, Sophos offers advanced features such as real-time
link following, threat isolation, spoof protection, etc.
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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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No answers on this topic
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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I have always found the answers I have needed in the documentation or online, and have not needed to contact Sophos Secure Email Gateways' support team. This, I think, bodes well for how their software is easy to use and has good documentation when you cannot find what you need in the basic interface.
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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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Many other solutions are a complicated setup and take a lot of time for the configuration. With Sophos email we were setup and seeing data/emails within an hour. As I have described the ease of use from a high-level for someone like me a Director just peeking into the system or an analyst that can do a deep dive is one of the best users interfaces I have seen for any product.
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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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  • We have prevented several cases of employees tried to steal organization's information; this has a great effect on the ROI not only in dollars but also in our reputation.
  • We have used it for more than 4 years, which is more than typical technology adoption we usually do; and this is the result of the above causes (prevention of internal fraud).
  • Need to have an expert of regex to accommodate more advanced DLP function/requirements
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ScreenShots