Compare Barracuda 

PERFORMANCE

Barracuda is an SMB play and can only handle small volumes of users and traffic. Their mail systems can’t handle the high‐volume mail loads of an organization with thousands of users or those with significant throughput environments.

• Barracuda solutions are sold by functionality, so low‐end models have substantially less capability. Important features such as LDAP access, end‐user controls, and spam quarantines are not available, forcing users to move up to more expensive systems just to get the basic functionality that their businesses need. To get a fully‐functional Barracuda system, a user would have to pay approximately $10,000 for a properly equipped Model 600. Customers report having to run 4 or 5 of the largest Barracuda appliances to handle the mail load that a single XCS appliance processes.

• Barracuda launched a 1st generation reputation service, Barracuda Central, whose effectiveness is highly questionable.

• Barracuda uses extremely cheap components in their appliances, resulting in a high DOA and high failure rate in the field.

VIRUS PROTECTION

Barracuda has materially weaker virus outbreak protection and relies on Anti‐Virus signatures from the open source ClamAV project. New virus signatures have to be written, tested, and distributed by volunteers, and since they are manually created, they have been known to significantly delay protection. There have been issues where broken virus signatures were distributed to customers that resulted in a complete shut‐down of mail processing by Barracuda appliances.

• Barracuda has a known weakness with regards to directory harvest attacks. Although Barracuda can validate recipients against LDAP, they do not tarpit the attackers because they can only reject on unknown recipient (ROUR). Although they may block detected traffic, they cannot stop the IP from continuing to connect and clogs the network. In contrast, WatchGuard XCS has the ability to block the IP at the connection level upon detection of a directory harvest attack.

MANAGEMENT

All WatchGuard XCS appliances provide an intuitive and easy‐to‐use Web based management UI that is designed using the same principals as the Microsoft Ribbon UI. All administrative and configuration tasks are performed through this browser‐based interface.

• XCS appliances provide on‐demand zero‐admin clustering for unparalleled capacity and performance creating a large virtual machine that can handle even the most demanding messaging loads, without losing a single message.

• All systems are managed through a single point of access and all configurations are automatically replicated across all systems.

• XCS also provides centralized management to extend policies globally to systems located anywhere in the world.

Barracuda’s mail policy configurations such as spam handling, attachment‐stripping, and footer stamping are applied system‐wide, with no ability to configure different policies for different user groups unless a customer purchases a 400 or higher model 400 (which can do domain‐based policies), or a 600 or higher model (which can do user‐based policies).

• Administrators of Barracuda appliances can’t create business‐specific overrides for different users, and that all security is limited to the “least common denominator” for protection unless upgrading to a higher model.

• In addition, Barracuda customers have reported that Barracuda appliances feature a poorly organized UI that is not intuitive and requires many unnecessary steps to perform a simple function. This can be a significant productivity drain on administrators or small business owners who are increasingly under pressure to improve efficiency.

REDUNDANCY

Barracuda does not offer message‐level redundancy on any of its boxes. This technology is unique to the WatchGuard XCS appliances and is a key differentiator.

• Barracuda, does, however, offer clustering and centralized management in its 400 or higher models.