Barracuda ESG (discontinued) vs. AppRiver from OpenText

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.

I would highly recommend AppRiver for inbound email filtering. We have been very pleased with the performance and the ease of use. The occasional email does get through, but I have had that happen on any email filtering we have used in the past. Great product and great support as well

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Ease of management for a MSP. Even though there is no integration w/ PSA tools currently, I don't see this as a negative. The management is multi-tenant and simple to navigate.
• Support via chat is fast and very competent. Only downside is they are just available during extended business hours, not 24x7 on the chat.
• Reselling Office 365 is very simple and gives us an advantage over our competitors. Includes pre sales support and post sale support.
• Encrypted email services act much like others, it works very well and includes and Outlook Plug in to make it obvious you intend to send messaged encrypted.
• Email continuity. Email queuing is included, so if your onsite server goes down, mail queues at the spam filter until service is restored. You can step it up w/ their email continuity service which give you access to your mail at the spam filter in cases where your mail server is down for an extended period of time.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We had an issue with bills coming to us instead of going directly to the client that took a little longer to fix than we would have preferred.
• It would be nice if the bills included the domain name. When I was receiving my client's bill, it was difficult to tell which domains the bill was for.
• Cost a little more than from Microsoft directly.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

AppRiver is very easy to use. A new employee can begin using it on their first day.

Incentivized

Availability is robust and flawless. This is a non-issue, its always up & running and fail-over protection is available for restarts or upgrades.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

AppRiver's live support is above what I expected, and I use it exclusively. I always get a professional, courteous, and knowledgeable tech that is easy to understand within a few minutes of placing a call. If you do have to leave a message they have always promptly returned my call.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

AppRiver takes Microsoft 365 and simplifies the billing, provisioning, and support, to the point that we no longer have to deal with Microsoft directly, are able to simply focus on the product, rather than all the settings, setup, and all the other headaches typically associated with setting up a Microsoft365 Tenant.

Incentivized

• 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💵

Incentivized

• We were able to drop our email scanning software that was taking hours to clear the cache of emails daily. The reduction in delays on email scanning improved our efficiency as emails take seconds to minutes to get to where they are going not hours.
• Encrypted email service (Cypher-Post) is difficult to use as well as our recipients do not like how difficult it is to use. The stub emails that contain links often get deleted because people are trained not to click on links in emails. This has caused substantial delays in people getting emails from us.

Incentivized