Sophos UTM vs Barracuda

If you need to ask about Barracuda products, you'd be best served by asking on their forums.

We use two Barracuda appliances - their email/spam firewall and their backup server. We also run an SG210. The Barracuda products are good, but for the most part they are ala-cart. If you look at the UTM, all the different security provisions (firewall, spam filter, VPN, advanced threat protection, intrusion protection, endpoint protection, webserver protection etc..) run on a single appliance and work together (at least when Sophos doesn't break something with an update).

Barracuda, on the other hand places many of these protections/services on separate appliances. To get the same protection you would need to purchase several appliances, and they are quite expensive. Even though we still are using our barracuda email/spam firewall (our Barracuda license goes thru the end of this year) we will be switching over to all Sophos before year-end. I will preface this with "unless they are simply unable or unwilling to get their act together with their updates, support and technology as a whole".

Dave

My personal experience with Barracuda Mail Archiver and the Barracuda Load Balancers is that their support leaves a lot to be desired. The guys that manage the Load Balancers have actually hung up on Barracuda support because they just can't seem to understand the needs of a production environment.

I never had issue with their Mail Archiver support until I needed to expand storage and decided to use their cloud solution. Half-backed and not enterprise ready. Their support was atrocious and took months to resolve some of the data migration issues. One of their engineers (not tech support) flat out said they aren't very good at e-mail support, they are only geared for phone support. So if you have an ongoing issue, they will ignore you unless you call them every day for updates. I expect more for the amount of money we are paying them.

I have used the Barracuda spam filter appliance for anout 10 years.  Probably an industry leading product then, but has not been reimagined since.   Cloud version seemed to be similar design but much more money.  However, I have always found their support very responsive and competent and American.

I use UTM spam filter to catch tbe spam that Basracuda lets through.   The combination is very effective.  I have a vendor prospecting me with the assertion that Barracuda has a competitive disadvantage with allowed spam, so kt may be a systemic issue.

You have not said what you are shopping for.   I would be interested to see your RFP requirements and what it will cost to meet thrm.  UTM has been a pretty good value for me, but if I had time and money for a new procurement, I would look for features that I wish were in UTM, but I don't think it exists in my price point.