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Cloudberry Alternatives and Competitors in 2023

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Updated 2nd January 2023, Rob Morrison

Information protection has always been important for both enterprises and smaller companies. The main reason for that is the nature of the consequences of losing your data. This is how it works most of the time: if you’ve lost your company’s data – you’re highly likely to lose your company as a whole. The data protection market is always growing and inventing new ways of data protection, backups and so on.

There are quite a lot of different backup solutions available nowadays, each with their own specialties and advantages. One of those services is MSP360 Backup (formerly Cloudberry Backup), a service that is quite unique since, unlike most of its competitors, MSP360 doesn’t provide their own cloud storage for their clients. Instead it serves as a connection between a specific client and a specific cloud storage provider. Of course, MSP360 provides more traditional backup options, like local backups and others – the same way a lot of MSP360 alternatives do. But the main feature of this product is the ability to work with multiple cloud providers – in this field MSP360’s flexibility is quite impressive.

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MSP360 packs a lot of features when it comes to working with cloud backups. Here are some of the more significant ones:

65 different cloud storage providers available, from the most popular ones, like Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3 and a lot more.
No restriction to a specific cloud storage provider – or to a specific backup type, on that matter. It means you can backup to different clouds, backup from cloud to cloud, make a physical backup from your cloud to NAS, your network or external drive, or even your basic local storage. Bootable USB drive creation is also on that list.

If you’re worried about losing storage space – there are several possible retention policies in place, you can use them to specify the exact time that the previous versions of your backups are being kept before getting deleted. This makes versioning possible, as well.
Server-specific restoring abilities are also available, which eases the possible migration processes. Including restoring server images to VMware, Hyper-V or even cloud-based virtual devices based in Azure VM or Amazon EC2.

Let’s talk about the price of MSP360. The product is distributed via one-time fee with several different versions of the product, each of them offering different list of features. One thing worth mentioning here is that one-time payment for MSP360 does not include the payment for the data you’ll be keeping at the cloud storage service of your choosing. There’s also a free version of MSP360 available, but it limits your possible data exchange amounts with the cloud storage service at 200 Gb and has little to no useful features like compression, encryption or community support.

One more trait that MSP360 is known for is its complexity. On one hand, MSP360‘s limited flexibility still allows you to interact with a lot of different parameters and makes it easier for you to make everything exactly how you want it to be. On the other hand, though, the complexity of the product itself might scare off some of the less knowledgeable users. MSP360 tries its best, for sure, but it’s still not as simple and user-friendly as some of the less complex competitors.

When it comes to both cloud-based backup speed and protection in general, it mostly depends on the cloud storage provider you are using. MSP360 itself is capable of working with up to AES 256-bit encryption, but it has to be supported by the cloud storage provider itself for that to work. The initial (and overall) backup speed might also differentiate a lot depending on a large number of factors, including physical distance between you and the server in question, your ISP (internet service provider) and the cloud service you chose.

The last obvious question is the support. There is no typical 24/7 available support, but there are a ticket system with a relatively high response speed. The community forums are also available, together with the FAQ section of the product itself.

MSP360 Backup as a whole is quite an interesting service. It’s not for everyone, not even remotely so, and it’s missing quite a lot of features that more flexible services are available to provide, largely sacrificing user-friendliness for complexity. Some features that are present in the MSP360 alternatives are the following:

Storage space included in the basic service package, since paying per Gb might be a bit pricey for some clients.
Mobile app of the specific service, which helps a lot with always being able to work with your service in question.
Open-source structure of the service provider makes it easier for some users to interact with it.

Scalability – the ability to work with different sizes of businesses, from smaller companies to enterprises.
Implementation of hybrid environments for different kinds of operations and projects, like disaster recovery, changing data centers, data migration in varying amounts and so on.

Knowing that the backup market itself is constantly growing and changing, it’s safe to say that more and more alternatives to MSP360 are bound to appear sooner or later. The main stimulators of such rapid growth are the following:

More and better backup technologies being developed;
Optimization of resources that’s currently used in both backup and restore processes, like CPU speed, storage capacity, network bandwidth and so on;

Creation of hybrid solutions of sorts, capable of adapting to any task you possible need, from daily backups to emergency recovery in case of a disaster.

As it stands, MSP360 is a relatively normal service with its pros and cons. It works well with both small and large businesses but favors users that have at least some knowledge in coding, since the service itself is quite complex. The main distribution policy is a one-time fee with additional payments for the amount of data stored – which might be useful for smaller companies that don’t have a lot of budget to spare and don’t need terabytes of free space to backup their work properly. There’s also a good number of useful features such as encryption, compression, community support and so on. It is worth noting that there are some difficulties with MSP360 as a whole, too, mainly due to its complexity and large amounts of frequent updates to work properly.

There are some similarities between Bacula Enterprise Edition and MSP360 (formerly Cloudberry). However the main difference lies in MSP360’s focus on working mainly with cloud backups, as opposed to Bacula which is more flexible in its storage destinations and natively integrates with a higher number of technologies (databases and hypervisors, for example). Bacula combines this high degree of compatibility and modularity with low operating costs. Bacula’s flexibility in this regard is almost unmatched, capable of adapting to almost any IT requirement. Bacula is a strong alternative as an enterprise backup solution, providing both high granularity control and user friendliness at the same time. It is also important to note that Bacula does not charge by data volume. So the more data you have to back up, the greater becomes Bacula’s value.

About the author

Rob Morrison is the marketing director at Bacula Systems. He started his IT marketing career with Silicon Graphics in Switzerland, performing strongly in various marketing management roles for almost 10 years. In the next 10 years Rob also held various marketing management positions in JBoss, Red Hat and Pentaho ensuring market share growth for these well-known companies. He is a graduate of Plymouth University and holds an Honours Digital Media and Communications degree, and completed an Overseas Studies Program.