Cohesity is a comprehensive data management platform specializing in secondary data workflow consolidation. It can work with an abundance of workload types in a single interface – including files, objects, test/dev, backups, and even analytics in one place. Cohesity’s SpanFS is its own file system with a hyperscale design that makes it easier to perform seamless data management in different environments with extensive deduplication as a main feature.
Cohesity’s enterprise-focused approach with more versatile data analytics and support for multi-cloud makes it better than Acronis in this regard. At the same time, Acronis has a bigger variety in its price tags, making it possible for some SMBs to afford its services. Additionally, Acronis’s focus on endpoint protection is not comparable with Cohesity’s Helios platform, which offers superior global visibility and control across all deployments. With that being said, Cohesity is also much more difficult to learn, and implementing such a solution into your work infrastructure might also require a lot more skill compared with Acronis.
Customer score:
- Capterra – 4.6/5 points based on 49 customer reviews
- TrustRadius – 8.5/10 points based on 84 customer reviews
- G2 – 4.4/5 points based on 47 customer reviews
- Gartner – 4.7/5 points based on 750 customer reviews
- PeerSpot – 4.5/5 points based on 69 customer reviews
Benefits:
- A selection of features that are not present in most of the competitors’ toolkits, such as rapid backup recovery or incremental application-aware backups.
- Relatively simple initial configuration process that should not cause issues for any user regardless of their skill level.
- Convenient task management capabilities that simplify backup and recovery management.
Disadvantages:
- Problematic backup immutability that leaves the data exposed and modifiable to certain user clearance levels.
- Unsatisfying customer support experience with a heavy reliance on standardized responses.
- The necessity to install some software updates manually with the help of a command line interface.
Customer reviews:
- Joshua V. – Capterra – “We have been very happy. We have eliminated tape backups, eliminated our legacy NAS devices, and added new features we didn’t know we would even get at the time we purchased… like O365 backups and AD backups. The engineering team is aggressively working to extend the product to more use cases in the data management realm.”
- Michael H. – Capterra – “Cohesity has been excellent to work with. The local team is always helpful and responsive, support is excellent, and the product exceeds all expectations. We started small because we were uncertain that they could do all of the things we heard about during the pre-sale process, but we couldn’t be happier with the product. We are currently in the process of tripling our capacity and adding additional features because we were so impressed by every aspect of Cohesity.”
Pricing (at the time of writing):
- No official pricing information can be obtained from Cohesity’s public sources.
A personal opinion of the author:
Cohesity may be a good pick for large enterprise environments that are concerned with the issue of data sprawl. The ability to index and search across the entirety of protected information makes it extremely convenient for companies looking into deriving value from their secondary data. At the same time, Cohesity would be practically unusable for most SMBs due to both its complexity and cost. It has a highly extensible API-first architecture but configuring and maintaining it without a dedicated IT team would be daunting, if anything. Cohesity also has a rather complex licensing structure, which makes it stand out when compared with Acronis’s standardized pricing model.
Veritas NetBackup is an established data protection solution that has been around for a while. It can provide a comprehensive feature set that covers not only backup and recovery but also data governance and disaster recovery for practically any environment type. It is also one of the best options on the market when it comes to sophisticated automation tasks, and its proprietary hardware appliances provide storage, deduplication, and protection capabilities in the same solution.
NetBackup is significantly more complex than Acronis, with a strict focus on the enterprise market. Although, it is also much more robust when it comes to supporting compliance matters and working with all kinds of applications. It can be somewhat overwhelming at first due to the nature of the solution, but it is fair to say that Veritas can provide much more granular control over backup policies compared with Acronis (which is mostly focused on integrated cyber protection for smaller businesses).
Customer score:
- Capterra – 4.1/5 stars based on 11 customer reviews
- TrustRadius – 7.5/10 stars based on 90 customer reviews
- G2 – 4.0/5 stars based on 111 customer reviews
- Gartner – 4.8/5 points based on 429 customer reviews
- PeerSpot – 4.1/5 points based on 114 customer reviews
Benefits:
- Substantial number of features to choose from when it comes to backup and recovery tasks.
- Relatively user-friendly interface with convenient access to most features.
- Customer support team with a lot of positive reviews over the years.
Disadvantages:
- Basic tape backup support with several issues of note.
- Plenty of unconventional operational logic behind certain actions and tools (the inability to export into PDF without a pre-installed Adobe Reader application, for example).
- Rigid reporting capabilities do not offer much in terms of customization and are rarely helpful.
Customer reviews:
- Zalman R. – Capterra – “It served me well for 25 years. However, I don’t know what the current version can do. They were not able to show me a demo. In the end I bought Veeam. There are a few features that I use. There is the normal backup and restore. Replication on to the cloud. The 2 capabilities that I found important was (1) an IMMUTABLE Backup. It is a local secondary backup that can’t be overwritten. Good protection against ransomware. It requires a Linux OS. (2) If the server crashes, I can bring up a backup and have people continue working until a new server is created. The only issue is that this can’t be backed up while being accessible to the end user. Unitrend offers (2),but not (1). They only have Cloud Backup.”
- Russell C. – Capterra – “We used Backup Exec for several years to push backups to tape and to physical hard disks. Failures were frequent and frustrating.”
Pricing (at the time of writing):
- No official pricing information can be found on the Veritas website.
A personal opinion of the author:
From an industry perspective, Veritas is a great example of a software that continues to evolve to this day despite being one of the first commercially available offerings in this market. It can work with massive enterprises with thousands of endpoints in a centralized manner, and its cloud integration capabilities are just one example of how committed Veritas is to modernizing itself as time goes on. The primary focus of Veritas is to be the cornerstone of enterprise data management – which makes it dramatically different from Acronis and its all-in-one cyber protection approach.
Veeam is one of the leading backup and recovery solutions on the market, with a special focus on virtualized environment protection. Veeam can provide comprehensive data protection capabilities to a large selection of virtual, physical, and cloud workloads, with a strong feature set that includes data management and information security features.
Veeam can demonstrate far stronger backup and recovery capabilities for virtual environments compared with Acronis, but it may mean having a less powerful cybersecurity feature set. Veeam’s primary focus is to deliver robust backup and replication capabilities with significant granularity in virtual environments, while Acronis is more about providing a combined solution that can perform backup and cybersecurity tasks at once.
Customer score:
- Capterra – 4.8/5 stars based on 74 customer reviews
- TrustRadius – 9.0/10 stars based on 1,593 customer reviews
- G2 – 4.6/5 stars based on 624 customer reviews
- Gartner – 4.6/5 points based on 1,768 customer reviews
- PeerSpot – 4.3/5 points based on 422 customer reviews
Benefits:
- Convenient initial configuration process.
- Dedicated free version of many elements of the platform as the means of assisting micro businesses.
- High-quality customer support that has been receiving positive customer reviews for years.
Disadvantages:
- High basic price of the platform.
- Large number of capabilities and features tends to confuse a lot of new users.
- Lackluster user interface and problematic scalability are not helping the matters, either.
Customer reviews:
- Taryn F. – Capterra – “Veeam local support for new business is outstanding. Renewal support is not local, but is sufficient. Overall, VBR is a great product, and used in the majority of our customer base.”
- Rahul J. – Capterra – “I am using Veeam since from February 2021. It’s actually a best software but faced many times backup issue when Server size were more than 1TB. Otherwise restoration process are good, Instance recovery process are also simple and useful for migration also.it’s seriously very good software for full server type backup(Host base backup).”
Pricing (at the time of writing):
- Veeam’s pricing information is not publicly available on their official website, and the only way to obtain such information is to contact the company directly for a quote or a free trial.
- However, there is a pricing calculator page that lets users specify the number of different environments they want covered with Veeam’s solution, as well as the planned subscription period. All of that can be sent to Veeam in order to receive a personalized quote.
A personal opinion of the author:
Veeam manages to successfully balance enterprise-grade functionality with a certain level of user-friendliness, which is not something that a lot of backup solutions of the same scale can provide. Veeam has been evolving constantly ever since its very first iteration, earning its reputation as a reliable and powerful backup solution with an abundance of features. It focuses on backup and recovery capabilities the most, even if it does come with a somewhat weaker feature set in other departments, such as cybersecurity (this is where it loses to Acronis and similar solutions). Veeam has extensive documentation and a highly effective customer support team, both of which make troubleshooting a lot easier, and its commitment to staying ahead of the industry in the form of modern and often unique backup capabilities make it a one-of-a-kind solution on the market in many ways.
Druva is a cloud-native data protection platform capable of providing backup, disaster recovery, and data governance capabilities in a single package. Its software-as-a-service model makes it possible to completely eliminate the necessity of hardware requirements without losing on the degree of protection for endpoints and cloud workloads, among others. Another important feature that makes Druva somewhat unique in this market is its built-in global deduplication capabilities that are active for all the workloads and sites covered by the solution, reducing storage costs and conserving bandwidth.
Druva focuses all of its efforts on delivering enterprise-level data protection capabilities without any hardware footprint, which makes it drastically different from Acronis’s selection between cloud and on-premises deployment options. Druva is a cloud-based solution, first and foremost, and its global deduplication is only one of many features that contribute to the lower total cost of ownership. It is a very different approach from Acronis that uses a traditional licensing model that can become quite expensive for large enterprises.
Customer score:
- Capterra – 4.7/5 stars based on 17 customer reviews
- TrustRadius – 9.7/10 stars based on 475 customer reviews
- G2 – 4.7/5 stars based on 577 customer reviews
- Gartner – 4.8/5 points based on 744 customer reviews
Benefits:
- Impressive customer support experience reported by a lot of customers over the years.
- User-friendly interface with convenient navigation between features.
- Noteworthy data security feature set with configurable immutability, extensive encryption, and other capabilities.
Disadvantages:
- Limited customization of certain features – Windows snapshots, SQL cluster backups, etc.
- Problematic first-time setup and configuration process.
- Data restore from cloud takes a long time in most cases.
Customer reviews:
- Dinesh Y. – Capterra – “My experience with druva end point is amazing. from the time of onboarding this software I am not worried about data loss of the users. But I think druva can think more discount for NGO as well as corporate so that everyone use it extensively.”
- Andy T. – Capterra – “Our original POC when testing this product was very thorough and we were given ample time to test it and make sure it was going to fit how we needed it. Setting it up was incredibly easy and we were able to figure out a lot of the features on our own with minimal help. When we needed help, the team we were working with was great. We also had to work with support and that was great as well.”
Pricing (at the time of writing):
- Druva’s pricing is relatively sophisticated. It offers different pricing plans depending on the type of device or application covered.
- Hybrid workloads:
- “Hybrid business” – $210 per month per Terabyte of data after deduplication, offering an easy business backup with plenty of features such as global deduplication, VM file-level recovery, NAS storage support, etc.
- “Hybrid enterprise” – $240 per month per Terabyte of data after deduplication, an extension of the previous offering with LTR (long-term retention) features, storage insights/recommendations, cloud cache, etc.
- “Hybrid elite” – $300 per month per Terabyte of data after deduplication, adds cloud disaster recovery to the previous package, creating the ultimate solution for data management and disaster recovery
- There are also features that Druva sells separately, such as accelerated ransomware recovery, cloud disaster recovery (available to Hybrid elite users), security posture & observability, and deployment for U.S. government cloud
- SaaS applications:
- “Business” – $2.5 per month per user, the most basic package of SaaS app coverage (Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, the price is calculated per single app), can offer five storage regions, 10 GB of storage per user, as well as essential data protection
- “Enterprise” – $4 per month per user for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace coverage with features such as groups, public folders, and Salesforce.com coverage for $3.5 per month per user (includes metadata restore, automated backups, compare tools, etc.).
- “Elite” – $7 per month per user for Microsoft 365/Google Workspace, $5.25 for Salesforce, includes GDPR compliance check, eDiscovery enablement, federated search, GCC High support, and many other features.
- Some features here can also be purchased separately, such as Sandbox seeding (Salesforce), Sensitive data governance (Google Workspace & Microsoft 365), and GovCloud support (Microsoft 365).
- Endpoints:
- “Enterprise” – $8 per month per user, can offer SSO support, CloudCache, DLP support, data protection per data source, and 50 GB of storage per user with delegated administration.
- “Elite” – $10 per month per user, adds features such as federated search, additional data collection, defensible deletion, advanced deployment capabilities, and more.
- Plenty of features could be purchased separately here, including advanced deployment capabilities (available in the Elite subscription tier), ransomware recovery/response, sensitive data governance, and GovCloud support.
- AWS workloads:
- “Freemium” is a free offering from Druva for AWS workload coverage; it can cover up to 20 AWS resources at once (no more than two accounts) while offering features such as VPC cloning, cross-region, and cross-account DR, file-level recovery, AWS Organizations integration, API access, etc.
- “Enterprise” – $7 per month per resource, starting from 20 resources, with an upper limit of 25 accounts. It extends upon the previous version’s capabilities with features such as data lock, file-level search, import existing backups, prevent manual deletion, 24/7 support with 4 hours of response time at most, etc.
- “Elite” – $9 per month per resource, has no limitations on managed resources or accounts, adds auto-protection by VPC, AWS account, GovCloud support, and less than 1 hour of support response time guaranteed by SLA.
- Users of Enterprise and Elite pricing plans can also purchase Druva’s capability to save air-gapped EC2 backups to Druva Cloud for an additional price.
- It is easy to see how one can get confused by Druva’s pricing scheme as a whole. Luckily, Druva also has a dedicated webpage built to create a personalized estimate of a company’s TCO in just a few minutes.
A personal opinion of the author:
Druva is the only solution on the list to offer a completely hardware-free approach to data security, which makes it stand out a lot in the typically crowded market of backup solutions. It can provide a unified data protection approach that focuses all security efforts for data centers, endpoints, and cloud workloads in the same environment, making it especially attractive for businesses that want to simplify their backup infrastructure. Druva’s built-in compliance and legal hold feature set is a massive advantage for many modern companies, with a few exceptions of businesses that fall under strict data sovereignty requirements without any exceptions (which may be a problem for Druva’s cloud-centric approach).
Commvault Cloud is another example of a cloud-centric solution on the market of backup and recovery software, although this one is more of a recent evolution of a previously much more traditional platform. Commvault can offer comprehensive data management in different environment types and an especially powerful feature set when it comes to working with complex enterprise workloads. Additionally, Commvault Cloud provides a number of AI-powered features in its latest iteration, such as AI-based anomaly detection and backup optimization capabilities.
Commvault Cloud has a comparatively more complex enterprise feature set and a more in-depth integration with business apps, although it does come with a much higher price tag and a significant increase in complexity compared with solutions such as Acronis. Commvault relies a lot on extensive customization and granular control over data as its primary selling points, and its Command Center is a useful tool for centralizing data management and providing detailed analytics, neither of which can be replicated by Acronis at the same level of complexity.
Customer score:
- Capterra – 4.6/5 points based on 39 customer reviews
- TrustRadius – 8.3/10 points based on 225 customer reviews
- G2 – 4.3/5 points based on 143 customer reviews
- Gartner – 4.5/5 points based on 479 customer reviews
- PeerSpot – 4.3/5 points based on 105 customer reviews
Benefits:
- Flexible and convenient backup configuration.
- Accessible collaboration capabilities with convenient data exchange with a number of other data management platforms.
- Substantial feature set with many integrations to choose from.
Disadvantages:
- Problematic logging and reporting capabilities with a lot of issues to them.
- Rigid and unresponsive user interface.
- Complex initial setup process for most users.
- Typically very expensive
Customer reviews:
- Fernando S. – Capterra – “Good solution for backup Office 365 produts. Price is very interesting option. Must improve some options but in my opinion, good option for use for SMB”
- Ankit K. – Capterra – “I have been using CommVault software from past 5 years. I have used couple of more backup solution but I like CommVault the most due to its simplicity. Also, Commvault is not just a backup tool it is a complete data management solution.”
Pricing (at the time of writing):
- No official public pricing information can be found on Commvault’s website.
A personal opinion of the author:
Commvault Cloud represents a good example of a more traditional backup and recovery solution turning into a modern cloud-native backup environment without substantial losses in terms of its feature set. Commvault still excels in scenarios with demanding data governance and compliance requirements, providing a much more complex and multi-faceted approach to these topics than Acronis. Commvault’s intelligent data management capabilities can even optimize storage costs and performance based on existing usage patterns, which is practically unheard of in this industry. With that being said, the current abundance of features in Commvault’s solution does make it very difficult to pick up for most SMBs, both because of its costs and because of how difficult the onboarding can be for most users.
Arcserve UDP is a comprehensive data protection solution that combines backup and disaster recovery feature set with high availability tools in the same solution. Providing robust data security measures across physical, virtual, and cloud environments is the primary purpose of Arcserve’s solution, made possible with its convenient centralized management console. The Assured Recovery feature is a noteworthy capability of Arcserve that has little to no alternatives – it can automate disaster recovery testing while providing a detailed report on a company’s RPOs and RTOs to ensure that each company would be able to meet its service level agreements and compliance requirements.
Arcserve is much more advanced in terms of high availability and complex recovery scenarios than Acronis, although its cybersecurity capabilities are definitely weaker in comparison. Arcserve UDP focuses on traditional data protection with a specialization in V2V and P2V recovery scenarios, which is different from Acronis’s main approach that combines backup and security feature sets. While both solutions can offer deduplication capabilities to a certain degree, Arcserve’s iteration of this tool offers better ratios than Acronis’s.
Customer score:
- Capterra – 4.7/5 points from 9 customer reviews
- TrustRadius – 6.5/10 points from 13 customer reviews
- G2 – 4.3/5 points from 16 customer reviews
- Gartner – 4.2/5 points based on 111 customer reviews
- PeerSpot – 3.8/5 points based on 43 customer reviews
Benefits:
- No need for a physical deployment for Arcserve’s solution to start working.
- A lot of powerful backup management and information security capabilities.
- Most of the basic capabilities are easy to work with.
Disadvantages:
- Potentially high storage requirements due to the lack of deduplication capability.
- Limited mobility due to the lack of a web-based interface or a mobile version of the solution.
- Inaccessible to most SMBs due to its focus on large-scale businesses and enterprises.
Customer reviews:
- AVINASH S. – Capterra – “A very good DR solution. Arcserve is a backup software provider for a long time and are now back in the market with its new set of products and services. For the organizations who Intends to definitively solve the tasks of safeguarding corporate information by implementing a Disaster Recovery solution, I think it is a very good solution.”
- Andrei P. – Capterra – “If you have a strong IT team and are afraid to lose all your data, I would definitely recommend Arcserve. It is a great recovery software if you have and IT team to unlock its full potential.”
Pricing (at the time of writing):
- Arcserve UDP does not offer pricing information on its official website.
- The only way to obtain such information is to request a personalized quote from Arcserve.
A personal opinion of the author:
Arcserve UDP is a mature backup solution that manages to update some of its features without losing the existing support for legacy environments. It can handle both traditional and modern workloads with relative ease, which makes it invaluable for older companies with diverse infrastructure requirements. There are many capabilities in which Arcserve does not compare with a lot of its alternatives, namely Acronis, but the general commitment of the former to the focus on business continuity makes it more than valuable for a specific category of businesses. With that being said, it is also important to be aware of Arcserve’s less polished tools, such as its cloud integration capabilities, or the overall state of the solution’s documentation.
Microsoft Azure Backup is a cloud-integrated backup solution that offers comprehensive protection to Azure workloads, on-premises services, and endpoint devices. Its deep integration with the Microsoft ecosystem is a unique advantage that no other backup solution on the market can offer, which translates into much better support of SharePoint or SQL Server workloads. Azure Backup can easily maintain consistent security policies across their entire infrastructure thanks to a combination of RBAC and Azure Active Directory, and the ability to leverage Azure’s global infrastructure makes it possible to use complex features such as cross-region recovery and geo-redundant storage with little to no prior configuration.
Azure Backup does not offer the same level of security capabilities that Acronis provides, and its overall range of supported platforms is also much more narrow. Yet, the primary goal of Azure Backup is to work within Microsoft’s ecosystem, and that kind of focus made it an interesting backup solution with a reasonable price tag. Azure Backup’s consumption-based pricing model offers substantial cost advantages for companies that are already invested into the Microsoft ecosystem, but protecting non-Microsoft workloads the same way would be a difficult task, and Azure’s feature set for such workloads is often severely limited.
Customer score:
- Capterra – 4.6/5 points based on 157 customer reviews
- TrustRadius – 8.6/10 points based on 92 customer reviews
- G2 – 4.4/5 points based on 87 customer reviews
- Gartner – 4.3/5 points based on 116 customer reviews
- PeerSpot – 3.9/5 points based on 52 customer reviews
Benefits:
- Convenient price calculation based on the amount of data that needs to be covered.
- Granular control over backup and recovery tasks.
- Easy integration with other Azure services can be a significant advantage to any user of Microsoft’s cloud environment.
Disadvantages:
- Requires a lot of bandwidth for every single full backup.
- Azure’s interface can be somewhat confusing to newcomers.
- Suffers from potential disadvantages of being cloud-based.
- The abundance of features in the Azure environment makes navigation so difficult that even finding a simple “Settings” menu might prove to be a challenge.
Customer reviews:
- jackie G. – Capterra – “I breathe easier at night realizing we have Azure Backup set up. I am convinced in this technique after having to checking up and entire backups several times. I would highly advise everyone and anyone who uses Azure to use Azure Backups; in reality, if they do not really, I doubt I would do deal with them.”
- Teran N. – Capterra – “I have used this a few times to backup our project data in cloud. The setup was easy and the team was able to configure things like backup policies easily.”
Pricing (at the time of writing):
- Azure Backup has a separate webpage that details all of the parts of its licensing model.
- The basic package of Azure Backup’s capabilities for its VMs boils down to two parts of the pricing model:
- Protected instances – the number of instances that Azure is working with.
- Storage – the amount of data stored in the service per instance.
- Azure’s smallest pricing tier covers everything under 50 GB of data under the same pricing model, with a single price tag of $5 + the amount of storage consumed.
- Azure can also cover regular data, as well, separated into four categories and two service groups:
- Locally redundant storage (LRS): $0.0224 per GB for the Standard Tier and $0.0027 per GB for the Archive Tier.
- Geo-redundant storage (GRS). $0.028 per GB for the Standard Tier, not available for the Archive Tier.
- Zone-redundant storage (ZRS). $0.0448 per GB for the Standard Tier, $0.0054 per GB for the Archive Tier.
- Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS): $0.0569 per GB for the Standard Tier and $0.0054 per GB for the Archive Tier.
- The Archival Tier is supposed to be used for long-term retention – monthly or yearly backups with retention periods starting at six months.
- It is also possible to lower this total cost by going to the Reserved Capacity route – committing to either a year or three years of Azure Backup services for a lower price tag. That way, the total price for all four of the categories above falls to:
- Locally redundant storage (LRS).
- One year: $24,222 for 100 TB per month, $236,760 for 1 PB per month.
- Three years: $66,060 for 100 TB per month, $642,634 for 1 PB per month.
- Geo-redundant storage (GRS).
- One year: $48,444 for 100 TB per month, $473,520 for 1 PB per month.
- Three years: $132,121 for 100 TB per month, $1,285,269 for 1 PB per month.
- Zone-redundant storage (ZRS).
- One year: $30,278 for 100 TB per month, $295,950 for 1 PB per month.
- Three years: $82,575 for 100 TB per month, $803,293 for 1 PB per month.
- Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS).
- One year: $61,528 for 100 TB per month, $601,413 for 1 PB per month.
- Three years: $167,805 for 100 TB per month, $1,632,406 for 1 PB per month.
- The overall pricing logic seems unclear, but these last four pricing groups (the entire Reserved Capacity category) represent the total price of the offering in advance for either one year or three years.
- More information about Azure Backup’s pricing can be found on their separate pricing webpage.
A personal opinion of the author:
Azure Backup is a representation of Microsoft’s vision for an integrated cloud service that can replace a traditional backup solution. It is focused mostly on Azure-hosted workloads and Microsoft applications, which narrows its target audience down somewhat. At the same time, Azure’s solution is nowhere near as comprehensive in its security measures compared with Acronis, and its ability to leverage the scale of Azure’s infrastructure for backup purposes can also be a disadvantage when it comes to businesses that need multi-cloud flexibility. There is also a substantial number of complaints about Azure’s management of hybrid environments, citing that a lot of more neutral solutions are much better at performing similar tasks.
Dell Data Protection Suite is a comprehensive enterprise data protection solution that combines several other technologies from Dell – Avamar, PowerProtect, NetWorker, and more. Data Protection Suite offers extensive coverage for enterprise workloads of practically any type, from modern containerized applications to more traditional databases. Similar to the previous example, Dell’s own infrastructure is where the software excels the most, but that is far from the only capability of this solution – it can also offer flexible deployment options and the ability to choose what data protection technologies to use depending on specific workload requirements.
Dell Data Protection Suite manages to offer a lot more when it comes to enterprise backup capabilities and hardware integrations compared to Acronis. At the same time, the solution in question is much more complex and expensive, making it practically unsuitable for anyone but the large-scale businesses and enterprises. Dell’s solution is somewhat more difficult to manage than Acronis due to its overall feature set, but the feature range alone is what makes Dell’s software more versatile than Acronis by default, making it a relatively fair trade-off.
Customer score:
- TrustRadius – 8.0/10 points based on 6 customer reviews
- G2 – 4.1/5 points based on 20 customer reviews
- Gartner – 4.6/5 points based on 797 customer reviews
Benefits:
- Large selection of features to choose from, providing immense flexibility to Dell’s solution.
- Extensive support for various storage types and operating systems.
- Convenient access to basic backup and recovery capabilities.
Disadvantages:
- Basic reporting capabilities with minimal customization.
- Potential issues with the restoration process are bound to appear if the hardware configuration is changed in any way.
- Dell’s customer support experience is often reported as wildly inconsistent.
Customer reviews:
- Rahul U. – G2 – “Liked: The hardened security for my firm devices, both Software and M.2 Hardware encryption. There are times when users forget their login PIN and laptop OS crashed then its impossible to recover data.”
- Cem Y. – G2 – “I like Dell Data Protection very much because it helps me to protect my personal computers as well as my work computers against malicious attacks. It has a very user friendly interface. You can protect you passwords, personal information perfectly. There are some properties of Dell Data Protection. I don’t understand some reports that it produces. It is hard to figure out what the problem is and which solution I need to apply. Its price can also be much more affordable. There may be some different price policies.”
Pricing (at the time of writing):
- Dell does not provide official pricing information about its software on its official website.
A personal opinion of the author:
Dell Data Protection Suite is a good example of how a more traditional enterprise vendor approaches modern data protection as a topic. Data Protection Suite can handle large-scale environments and complex applications, focusing most of its attention on mission-critical workloads. Acronis is much more powerful than Dell when it comes to security measures, but there is also the fact that Dell works a lot better with legacy systems and mainframe environments (even if it does come as a cost of higher complexity and more challenging software management). It is a justifiable investment for some companies, especially the ones that have already worked with Dell’s ecosystem in the past, but the overall challenge of setting up and managing such a complex environment might be a significant turn-off for a lot of businesses.
Bacula Enterprise offers a highly scalable enterprise-grade backup and recovery solution with substantial focus on customization, security and automation. Bacula uses its own modular system to offer support to a large number of environment types and storage locations, with all kinds of physical, virtual, and cloud environments being manageable using a centralized web-based interface. The software’s engine is also highly efficient, capable of handling massive datasets with little to no resource overhead. Additionally, it is one of the few large-scale backup solutions that has full capabilities in Linux and Unix environments as much as any other environment, making it especially capable of integrating into complex IT environments. Bacula also has advanced reporting and monitoring capabilities.
Bacula’s solution is much more customizable compared with Acronis, and its scalability is also a lot more superior. Its technical depth and flexibility are practically unprecedented – an invaluable advantage to companies with specific compliance requirements or unique infrastructure needs. At the same time, Acronis would be easier to get into, and it is generally considered more accessible for an average user who may not have any knowledge of Linux. However, the sheer range of capabilities that Bacula offers does outweigh its complexity for most technologically advanced companies, making it a powerful backup platform for its own audience. It is also worth noting that because of Bacula’s ability to scale, and integrate with practically any kind of storage, and its security levels, it is very popular in the Super Computing and HPC space. Bacula can be deployed on premise, off-premise and in the cloud.
Customer score:
- TrustRadius – 9.8/10 points based on 62 customer reviews
- G2 – 4.7/5 points based on 56 customer reviews
- Gartner – 4.7/5 points based on 5 customer reviews
- PeerSpot – 4.4/5 points based on 10 customer reviews
Benefits:
- A complete framework of backup and recovery processes in a single solution.
- Large selection of environment types to work with, ranging from physical servers to VMs, applications, databases, etc.
- Extensive job scheduling capabilities allow for a lot of creativity when it comes to working on complex backup sequences.
- Highly customizable and scalable
- Made for high security environments and large deployments.
Disadvantages:
- Both the web-based GUI and the command line interface could be improved.
- Some case-specific features would have a separate price tag added to the existing base subscription fee.
- First-time configuration processes require at least some Linux knowledge.
Customer reviews:
- Eloi C. – G2 – “We at the Brazilian Naval Supply System can cite reliability and great cost-benefit. In addition to Restore Database and Backup. We have advanced features and the ability to handle the high volume of data we need for daily life, performing snapshots, advanced deduplication, single file restores efficiently and reliably.”
- Patricia C. – G2 – “The job scheduling feature. Existing, full and differential backup types are the main ones we use. Fast restoration. We haven’t had any backup and recovery issues so far.”
Pricing (at the time of writing):
- Bacula Enterprise’s pricing information is not publicly available on its official website. The only way to obtain such information is by contacting the company directly for a quote.
- However, a lot of general licensing information is available on that same website. For example, there are plenty of different subscription plans that Bacula Enterprise can offer, even though there is no pricing available for any of them:
- BSBE – Bacula Small Business Edition – can cover no more than 20 agents and two contracts, offering features such as web support and BWeb management suite
- Standard – can cover up to 50 agents and two contracts, adds support answer deadlines (from 1 to 4 business days)
- Bronze – can cover up to 200 agents and two contracts, offers phone support and shorter deadlines for customer support (from 6 hours to 4 days)
- Silver – can cover up to 500 agents and three contracts, introduces a deduplication plugin and a lower customer support answer deadline (from 4 hours to 2 days)
- Gold – can cover up to 2,000 agents and five contracts, drastically reduces customer support answer deadline (from 1 hour to 2 days)
- Platinum – can cover up to 5,000 agents and five contracts, has PostgreSQL catalog support and one training seat per year for Administrator courses
A personal opinion of the author:
Bacula Enterprise’s overall approach is sometimes seen as more traditional than modern, prioritizing technical capabilities over user-friendliness. Bacula offers a powerful backup and recovery feature set with security features that are on a par with Acronis, and that can be configured to work in practically any environment. It offers sophisticated scheduling and resource management while handling incremental backups with as much efficiency as possible. That’s not to say that Bacula is a traditional solution at heart, far from it – the platform is constantly being updated and getting support for more features and platforms, including advanced cloud integration and improved container support, among others.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a capable data protection solution that offers a relatively straightforward approach to backup and recovery tasks with a strong focus in working with virtualized environments. It can offer comprehensive protection to physical, virtual, and cloud workloads while also being able to leverage commodity NAS devices as backup repositories. One of many unique features of NAKIVO is its capability to create and test automated disaster recovery workflows using a feature called Site Recovery.
Efficiency is the key priority of NAKIVO, making it a more straightforward alternative to Acronis with a lesser number of cybersecurity capabilities. NAKIVO also provides a straightforward and relatively cost-effective licensing model, making it a much more attractive offer for SMBs than Acronis. With that being said, NAKIVO does not offer much in terms of physical server protection, although its focus on virtual environments with features such as Flash-Free recovery does make it a great option for that specific environment type.
Customer score:
- Capterra – 4.8/5 points based on 419 customer reviews
- TrustRadius – 9.2/10 points based on 175 customer reviews
- G2 – 4.7/5 points based on 237 customer reviews
- Gartner – 4.8/5 points based on 433 customer reviews
- PeerSpot – 4.7/5 points based on 85 customer reviews
Benefits:
- Quick and efficient customer support team.
- Convenient process of initial configuration.
- Fast and user-friendly interface with easy navigation between tools and capabilities.
Disadvantages:
- A lot of the customer support knowledge is based on the Windows version of the software, which can make troubleshooting on Linux slightly more difficult.
- The cost of the software is extremely high, even by this market’s standards.
- Limited logging and reporting capabilities with little-to-no customization to speak of.
Customer reviews:
- Joe P. – Capterra – “My overall experience with NAKIVO Backup & Replication has been positive. The setup process was straightforward, same with updates, and the platform has proven to be reliable in both backup and recovery operations. It offers a comprehensive suite of features, including automation, instant VM recovery, and advanced backup scheduling, which has greatly improved the efficiency of our data protection strategy. The performance has been consistently solid, with minimal resource drain during backup windows. While there is room for improvement in terms of reporting capabilities, the value for money and ease of use make it an excellent choice for small to mid-sized businesses looking for robust backup solutions. Support team have also impressed everytime.”
- César S. – Capterra – “I’ve been having an good overall experience with Nakivo, reliable backups, that I can recover easily and the support are really fast to respond and to sort my issue out.”
Pricing (at the time of writing):
- NAKIVO’s pricing can be split into two main groups:
- Subscription-based licenses:
- “Pro Essentials” – from $2.50 per month per workload, covers most common backup types such as physical, virtual, cloud and NAS, while also offering instant granular recovery, virtual and cloud replication, storage immutability, and more
- “Enterprise Essentials” – from $3.20 per month per workload, adds native backup to tape, deduplication appliance integration, backup to cloud, as well as 2FA, AD integration, calendar, data protection based on policies, etc.
- “Enterprise Plus” does not have public pricing available, it adds HTTP API integration, RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), Oracle backup, backup from snapshots, and other features
- There is also a subscription available for Microsoft 365 coverage that costs $0.95 per month per user with an annual billing and can create backups of MS Teams, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and more
- Another subscription from NAKIVO is its VMware monitoring capabilitiy that comes in three different forms:
- “Pro Essentials” for $1.10 per month per workload with CPU, RAM, disk usage monitoring and a built-in live chat
- “Enterprise Essentials” for $1.50 per month per workload that adds AD integration, 2FA capability, multi-tenant deployment, and more
- “Enterprise Plus” with no public pricing that adds RBAC and HTTP API integrations
- Perpetual licenses:
- Virtual environments:
- “Pro Essentials” for $229 per socket, covers Hyper-V, VMware, Nutanix AHV, and features such as instant granular recovery, immutable storage, cross-platform recovery, etc.
- “Enterprise Essentials” for $329 per socket, adds native backup to tape, backup to cloud, deduplication, 2FA, AD integration, and more
- “Enterprise Plus” with no public pricing that adds RBAC and HTTP API integrations, as well as backup from storage snapshots
- Servers:
- “Pro Essentials” for $58 per server, covers Windows and Linux, and features such as immutable storage, instant P2V, instant granular recovery, etc.
- “Enterprise Essentials” for $76 per server, adds native backup to tape, backup to cloud, deduplication, 2FA, AD integration, and more
- “Enterprise Plus” with no public pricing that adds RBAC and HTTP API integrations
- Workstations:
- “Pro Essentials” for $19 per workstation, covers Windows and Linux, and features such as immutable storage, instant P2V, instant granular recovery, etc.
- “Enterprise Essentials” for $25 per workstation, adds native backup to tape, backup to cloud, deduplication, 2FA, AD integration, and more
- “Enterprise Plus” with no public pricing that adds RBAC and HTTP API integrations
- NAS:
- “Pro Essentials” for $149 per one Terabyte of data, can backup NFS shares, SMB shares, folders on shares, and offer file level recovery
- “Enterprise Essentials” for $199 per one Terabyte of data, adds AD integration, 2FA support, calendar, multi-tenant deployment, etc.
- “Enterprise Plus” with no public pricing that adds RBAC and HTTP API integrations
- Oracle DB:
- “Enterprise Plus” is the only option available for Oracle database backups via RMAN, it can offer advanced scheduling, centralized management, and more
- VMware monitoring:
- “Pro Essentials” for $100 per socket with CPU, RAM, disk usage monitoring and a built-in live chat
- “Enterprise Essentials” for $150 per socket that adds AD integration, 2FA capability, multi-tenant deployment, and more
- “Enterprise Plus” with no public pricing that adds RBAC and HTTP API integrations
A personal opinion of the author:
NAKIVO is a great data protection solution that represents a delicate balance between accessibility and functionality. It works particularly well for organizations with limited resources, IT or otherwise, due to its combination of convenient web-based interface, straightforward deployment process, or the relatively low cost. NAKIVO offers a native backup to cloud capability to simplify cloud integration, and its focus on core backup and recovery functions makes it a great offering for smaller businesses. IT may not have quite the cybersecurity or backup flexibility that solutions such as Acronis can offer, however for some, it can be a more cost-effective backup software.
Rubrik has a reputation as a modern data management platform with simplicity and automation as its biggest touchpoints. It can offer a strong coverage of physical, virtual, and cloud environments using its dedicated Cloud Data Management platform. Rubrik’s metadata-driven search makes it easy to find and recover specific information across the entire infrastructure (including backups), and extensive analytical capabilities make it possible to derive additional value from existing information through data-driven decision or other means.
Despite the fact that Rubrik attempts to provide simplicity over almost everything else, it is a surprisingly complex enterprise-grade data management solution, making Acronis’s capabilities in the same field pale in comparison. Although, Rubrik does focus more of its attention on automation instead of the sheer backup and recovery feature set. That’s not to say that the solution is bad at performing backup and recovery tasks, far from it – it has exceptional recovery times and can offer policy-driven automation in the context of enterprise environments.
Customer score:
- Capterra – 4.7/5 points based on 47 customer reviews
- TrustRadius – 8.5/10 points based on 221 customer reviews
- G2 – 4.6/5 points based on 85 customer reviews
- Gartner – 4.7/5 points based on 724 customer reviews
- PeerSpot – 4.6/5 points based on 88 customer reviews
Benefits:
- Large list of integrations with VMs, databases, applications, etc.
- Many data protection capabilities with strong encryption, powerful ransomware protection, and many others.
- Often perceived as a balanced solution that offers both performance and versatility at the same time.
Disadvantages:
- Limited reporting and auditing capabilities dramatically reduce the amount of data the software can generate.
- High total cost of the software that makes it only affordable to medium-sized and large businesses.
- Rigid and lackluster implementation of RBAC.
Customer reviews:
- Blake W. – Capterra – “Rubrik is the product I recommend to any business looking for backing up environments, especially virtual ones and databases. Have been using them for 6 years and have never regretted choosing them. The proof was when we survived a cyber attack thanks in large part to their recoverability and support during the experience.”
- Kristinn Rafn E. – Capterra – “Overall everything works as described. It needs proper Postgresql support and better backwards compatability for legacy systems and the development is far too cloud focused for me. I want local access to the system and to be able to manage in the datacenter.”
Pricing (at the time of writing):
- Rubrik does not provide detailed pricing information on its official website.
A personal opinion of the author:
From a tech industry’s perspective, Rubrik attempts to provide a modern approach to enterprise data management, with simplification through automation as its most substantial selling points. It fits well with companies that require modern data protection strategies, with instant access to protected data and the ability to enforce global policies. It can also boast deep integration with existing tools and workflows using its API-first architecture, although it is often cited as one of the more complex solutions on the market, making Acronis more accessible and user-friendly in comparison. Rubrik commits to pursuing innovation by adding new and improved features on a regular basis, even if its primary focus on simplification does hurt a certain level of granularity that more enterprise-grade clients would want to have.
