Barracuda Essentials is a cloud-based email security solution that protects against common email threats, ensures email continuity, and provides data leak protection and email archiving capabilities. The solution is popular with businesses, but one of the main criticisms of the solution is Barracuda Essentials pricing. Many businesses discover it is possible to get all the features of the solution and better performance at a reduced cost by switching email security vendors.
Barracuda Essentials Pricing Policy
Like many email security solutions, Barracuda Essentials operates a tiered pricing policy. Customers are offered a choice of product tiers, with the lowest tier providing protection against all email threats and the premium tiers adding additional email security features such as cloud archiving.
A business with 250 employees looking for an email security solution that protects against malicious links and attachments, that has data loss protection capabilities, anti-phishing and anti-email impersonation protections, automatic remediation of threats, and account takeover protection, can expect to pay a cost of $2.66 per user per month or an annual cost of $7,980 for the solution.
The cost can be justified as $7,980 is far less than the cost of dealing with the cyberattacks that would occur were the solution not used; however, it is possible to get the same features and great email threat protection at a much lower price if you choose an alternative email security vendor, and SpamTitan Cloud is the leading Barracuda Essentials alternative.
SpamTitan Cloud Pricing
SpamTitan Cloud from TitanHQ has a much simpler pricing policy. Rather than providing basic and advanced protection in different product tiers, customers pay for the full-featured solution, with no added extras. Those features are provided regardless of the number of users that need to be protected. If you compare SpamTitan vs Barracuda Essentials pricing, you can get an equivalent level of protection and features, but you will pay $1.08 per user per month, or $3,225 per year. That is a saving of $4,755 per year.
With such a difference between Barracuda Essentials pricing and SpamTitan Cloud, it should come as no surprise to hear that many businesses have now made the switch.
SpamTitan Vs. Barracuda Essentials
There are many factors that should be considered when assessing email security solutions other than price, so how do Barracuda Essentials and SpamTitan Cloud compare?
When it comes to spam filtering, both solutions include phishing prevention, malware blocking, link scanning, outbound email filtering, and advanced threat protection. The tiered pricing system means that in order to get advanced features – which are included with SpamTitan Cloud – Barracuda customers must pay for the Sentinel package. With that package, customers get AI-driven protection against spear phishing and email impersonation attacks, and email authentication with DMARC. Those features are included with SpamTitan Cloud.
SpamTitan Cloud provides recipient verification, advanced machine learning, quarantining, spoofing protection, phishing detection, attachment filtering, data loss prevention, geo-blocking, DMARC, sandboxing, and real-time analysis, and all for a very low price.
User Ratings on G2 Crowd
The business software review platform on G2 is used by IT decision-makers to research products and discover the experiences of verified users of software solutions. Those reviews are combined to provide an overall score for each solution to help with the decision-making process. This is especially useful for a Barracuda Essentials and SpamTitan Cloud comparison, where the features provided are very similar. On the platform, SpamTitan is rated higher in 7 out of the 8 performance categories and achieves an overall rating of 4.5 stars out of 5, compared to 4 out of 5 for Barracuda. Those ratings are based on 183 reviews for SpamTitan and 68 reviews for Barracuda.
| SpamTitan | Barracuda | |
| Meets Requirements | 9.3 | 8.5 |
| Ease of Use | 9.1 | 8.7 |
| Ease of Setup | 9.0 | 8.6 |
| Ease of Admin | 8.9 | 8.8 |
| Quality of Support | 9.2 | 8.6 |
| Ease of Doing Business With | 9.3 | 8.7 |
| Product Direction (% Positive) | 8.3 | 8.1 |
The main reasons why businesses and managed service providers switch from Barracuda Essentials to SpamTitan Cloud is Barracuda Essentials pricing, the better quality of support with SpamTitan, to get AI-based threat detection capabilities without paying extra, and a more extensive threat intelligence database, which with SpamTitan includes data from 650 million users worldwide.
If you are currently a Barracuda Essentials customer and are looking to improve performance, get more features, and lower the cost of email protection, contact TitanHQ for further information. You can also take advantage of the free trial of SpamTitan Cloud to see for yourself how it compares to Barracuda Essentials.
FAQs
What is Barracuda Essentials?
Barracuda Essentials is a cloud-based email security solution that offers protection against email threats, ensures email continuity, and includes data leak protection and email archiving capabilities. The service is primarily aimed at Microsoft 365 customers and includes a comprehensive range of security features that integrate with Microsoft 365 plans.
What are some common criticisms of Barracuda Essentials?
The most common criticism of Barracuda Essentials is pricing. Some businesses believe they can get better performance with all the solution’s features at a reduced cost by switching to other email security vendors. There are also negative comments on review sites relating to ease-of-use, false positives, and the speed of email processing.
How does the Barracuda Essentials pricing policy work?
The Barracuda Essentials pricing policy works by giving customers the choice of three tiers. The lowest “advanced” tier covers protection against all email threats, while the “premium” and “premium plus” tiers include additional security features such as domain fraud protection, SIEM integration, cloud archiving, and security awareness training.
What is the key advantage of SpamTitan Cloud’s pricing policy compared to Barracuda Essentials?
The key advantage of SpamTitan Cloud’s pricing policy compared to Barracuda Essentials is that there is only one price. The one price is for a fully-featured solution without tiers of added extras – some of which customers may pay for but never use. (For example, if a Barracuda Essentials customer wants to add email archiving to their service, they also have to pay for security awareness training that may never be taken advantage of if the customer has an existing training program).
How much can a business save annually by switching from Barracuda Essentials to SpamTitan Cloud?
How much a business can save annually by switching from Barracuda Essentials to SpamTitan Cloud (based on 2021 pricing) is $4,755 per year per 250 employees/mailboxes. Since 2021, Barracuda has been less transparent about its pricing which is now “on application”. Consequently, it is impossible to conduct a like-for-like price comparison.
What advanced features does SpamTitan Cloud offer as standard?
Among the advanced features SpamTitan Cloud offers as standard, customers can enjoy the benefits of easy-to-configure recipient verification, advanced machine learning, quarantining, spoofing protection, phishing detection, attachment filtering, data loss prevention, geo-blocking, DMARC, sandboxing, and real-time analysis.