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Cohesity Competitors in 2023

(13 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

Updated 20th April 2023, Rob Morrison

Cohesity is widely known as a data storage company capable of working with enterprises of various sizes. It was founded in 2013 and the headquarters are in San Jose, California. Despite the fact that it’s a relatively new player on the market – it has already become established as one of the leading data storage solutions.

The company’s main solution is a platform designed for data management that includes backups, analytics, and more. Cohesity has also managed to largely eliminate IT silos by connecting parts of the system across both public and private clouds.

Cohesity as a service offers a lot of complementary products that can be split into four groups – Software, App Ecosystem, Distributed File System and Hyperconverged Platforms.

The essential Software part includes products like DataPlatform, DataProtect, Helios, and more.

Cohesity DataPlatform, as the name suggests, is a platform for most of Cohesity’s products and solutions, the main target of it is data and app consolidation, including files/objects, backups, analytics, and more – all of that on a software-defined platform based on their unique filesystem SpanFS. Since Data Platform is a software solution, it is capable of working efficiently on different platforms, including Dell, Cisco, HPE, or even Cohesity’s own hyperconverged platforms and the public cloud.

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Cohesity Features

DataPlatform’s main strengths are:

Architecture flexibility;
Management simplicity;
Operation efficiency.

The main use cases are data storage in general, backup and recovery operations, security and compliance, analytics, disaster recovery, and more.

DataProtect is a must-have comprehensive addition to DataPlatform, bringing in sophisticated protection and management based on policies for different workloads, such as databases, NAS, virtual and physical machines, cloud environments, etc. As any data protection solution, DataProtect strives to be fast, simple and flexible. It is capable of protecting workloads and bringing in a lot of different recovery levels, like granular file recovery, instant VM restoration, volume recovery, instant mass restore, and so on.

Helios, on the other hand, is all about monitoring your entire system’s backups, analytics, dev/test data and other. There’s also an extended all-in-one dashboard, customizable global reporting feature, GDPR and analogues compliance, system-wide policy management and cluster upgrade capabilities.

‘App Ecosystem’ is another important part of Cohesity’s products, allowing clients to run both Cohesity’s inside applications as well as third-party ones using their DataPlatform as a basis.

There’s an App Marketplace, as well, allowing you to choose from a variety of already existing business-critical applications using categories like data analytics, security, cyber exposure, compliance, and so on. Cohesity also offers a user-friendly software development kit and a bunch of API documentation, in case a client couldn’t find necessary apps in the market and wants to create one by themselves.

Distributed File System (or SpanFS) is Cohesity’s own invention based on the existing Ext4 system type. It is designed specifically to bring enterprise and cloud together, and there’s a lot of features included, like built-in deduplication, chunk management system, metadata separate storage for faster operations, and more.

An important part of Cohesity’s product catalog is their hyperconverged platforms, designed for storage consolidation and intensive workloads (C4000 and C3000 series, respectively). Both of those models are capable of supporting all of the modern hardware, including up to 2 Intel Xeon processors, up to 128Gb of RAM capacity, as well as terabytes of flash and HDD storage capacity. Cohesity’s platforms are relevant to users looking for a modern platform for their business needs.

However, that’s not the complete extent of Cohesity products’ capabilities – there’s also a number of solutions and use cases that can be performed with DataPlatform, Helios and other products above, including:

Backup and recovery
- Database: Oracle, SQL, SAP HANA;
- VM: Hyper-V, Kubernetes, VMware, AHV;
- Cloud: Google Cloud, AWS, Azure;
Cloud backup;
CDP (Continuous data protection);
Disaster recovery;
Long-term retention;
Test and development processes;
Anti-ransomware systems;
Compliance control, and more.

The backup solution market is quite a competitive one, and there are alternatives to Cohesity capable of providing similar or identical functions. Different users have a wide range of different needs, however there are some key features that some Cohesity competitors successfully take to the same market, such as:

Extensive reporting systems;
User-friendly UI/UX;
Capability to perform file-level restores from Windows servers;
Simple setup for Oracle databases;
Easy update process, and so on.

Cohesity Competitors

Cohesity offers flexibility and efficiency, although there are potentially many different alternatives to Cohesity. Resources such as Peerspot and Gartner are helpful for finding other solutions, covering a multitude of backup and recovery solutions with somewhat similar capabilities to Cohesity. Therefore, here is our interpreted list of the 10 best Cohesity alternatives in 2023:

Rubrik Security Cloud is a flexible backup and recovery solution with a rating of 4.8 out of 5 points based on 668 user reviews. Rubrik puts a lot of emphasis on speed and scalability, providing a rather versatile solution for all kinds of backup tasks and scenarios. Most of its praise goes towards the Live Mount feature, as well as various recovery aspects of the solution. At the same time, Rubrik is not particularly user-friendly when it comes to working with open-source database types, its reporting features lack detail in some cases, and more integrations with different software and solutions should be beneficial to this particular software.
Veritas NetBackup can be considered one of the most popular backup and recovery solutions on the market, with an average score of 4.8 points out of 5 and a total review count is at 413 reviews. It is a highly versatile and functional backup solution that mostly focuses its efforts on large enterprises with comprehensive data environments. Despite the fact that Veritas has a rather specific target audience, it is also a very flexible and scalable solution that works with many different target locations and packs plenty of useful features. At the same time, Veritas’s product line could use some consolidation efforts, the solution itself is fairly complex, and the interface of NetBackup is not the most user-friendly one on the market right now.
IBM Spectrum Protect has a relatively low rating of 4.3 out of 5 based on just 87 user reviews. It is one of several software solutions that IBM offers in the field of data protection, with IBM Spectrum Protect being centered around data security and centralization of various tasks related to data recovery. It offers different backup storage locations, and its backups are cost-effective, reliable, and can be restored with little to no delays. There are also some disadvantages to this solution, such as the lack of an option to migrate data from one operating system to another, its interface can be rather complicated for newcomers, and there are limited features related to ransomware protection.
Veeam Backup & Replication is a rather popular backup and recovery platform that has an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars with as many as 1421 reviews. It is a highly regarded backup and recovery solution with plenty of different features to work with, it comes with ransomware protection and reliable data loss protection features, while also being a fast and secure solution for many different organizations. It also has a number of ways it could improve itself, such as more options when it comes to cloud backups, broader support for different deployment types and databases, and its dashboards could use some work in terms of user-friendliness.
Commvault Complete Data Protection is a fairly versatile solution and platform that has a rating of 4.5 out of 5 with 422 user reviews. Commvault CDP is a solution for information management and data protection purposes that offers uniform data protection capabilities across different types of storage and different locations. It is commonly praised for its ransomware protection capabilities, as well as versatility, automation, and a rather friendly learning curve. At the same time, it is a rather expensive solution across the board, it lacks the capabilities to work with some of the older hardware appliances that companies may use, and more advanced features of Commvault are not the most user-friendly in terms of how easy it is to use them. Some users even claim that the lack of a subscription-based pricing model is a downside and not an advantage when it comes to licensing.

Druva Data Resiliency Cloud has a rather impressive rating of 4.8 out of 5 at 590 total reviews. It is a comprehensive data protection solution that offers three different fields it specializes in – data governance, data protection, and data cybersecurity. It can offer air-gapped backups, compliance monitoring capabilities, fast recovery times, fast backup times, versatile archival features, and more. It excels in automatic user control and its dashboards are detailed and useful. At the same time, the solution itself can be rather difficult to work with, both because of its overall complexity, and its user interface not being particularly user-friendly. Additionally, there seem to be plenty of issues with licensing if the license in question was not originally purchased using an MSP.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a popular backup solution with an average rating of 4.8 stars out of 5 based on 410 user reviews. It is a backup and recovery software that focuses its efforts on providing data protection features to various VM installments, be it VMware, Hyper-V, or others. It is a solution that is easy to set up, and easy to manage. Its versatility allows it to be deployed with the same speed no matter if it is in the cloud or on-premise. At the same time, it’s fair to say that some of the more specific features such as 2FA support are straight-up missing, the UI can feel a bit outdated, and the overall customer support experience seems to vary quite a lot from one case to another.
Acronis Cyber Protect is a versatile backup solution that has a relatively low score of 4.4 out of 5 points based on about 305 reviews. It is a self-proclaimed cyber protection solution that offers the best from both the data protection sphere and the cybersecurity sphere. Acronis can offer efficient data collection, fast operation speed, a relatively simple centralized management console, can work with both cloud and on-premise backups, and more. The overall user interface can be rather confusing and takes some time to get used to it, there is no integration with third-party cloud storage providers, and the average price of the solution is higher than the average on the market.
Zerto Platform sits at a comfortable rating of 4.7 out of 5 points with 204 total user reviews. Zerto is a combination of data protection and management solutions that offers a wealth of different features within a single versatile platform. It has extremely low RPOs, a responsive user interface, an easy initial setup, and even some of the more uncommon features, such as bubble testing scenarios. At the same time, Zerto’s automation capabilities are rather slim, its dashboard cannot be customized, the overall customer support seems to be rather lacking, and the solution itself requires a rather complex infrastructure to be deployed to its full extent.
Microsoft Azure Backup is the last, but not least, solution on this list, with a rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars based on 115 user reviews. It is a rather uncommon backup solution from the technological giant that is Microsoft, it can offer a plethora of different data protection methods, while also being a scalable and low-cost solution. It is not particularly complex as far as backup solutions go, but it is still a very fast and stable backup solution for many use cases. At the same time, its simplicity can be a disadvantage of this solution, with the lack of integrations for specific applications, a rather lackluster tech support, and a lack of more detailed backup configuration.

Bacula Enterprise can also be considered one of the key Cohesity competitors regarding backup and restore products. There are a high number of similarities between them, including an especially broad feature range, specific backup and recovery performance capabilities, true scaling capabilities, and more. However, there are also some benefits that often give Bacula an edge in the market, such as extensive Linux support, capability to work with a greater range of database types, Bacula’s own Progressive Virtual Full backup type, extensive bare metal backup and recovery capabilities, support for a wider range of virtual machines including Proxmox, and others. Bacula is also a market leader in supporting the roll-out of containers in operational environments – for example, being the only vendor in the world to be able to back up and recover Kubernetes Clusters, including its persistent data.

All in all, Bacula is a very strong alternative to Cohesity if you’re looking for a more customizable and agile solution, with advantages for Linux-savvy users and additional capabilities built in. For example, rapid recovery of high transaction, large MySQL databases allow organizations using Bacula to recover data much more quickly, for mission-critical business environments. Another example would be Bacula’s dedicated cloud management tools that allow fine grained control over data backed up to the cloud, including unique capabilities such as single file recovery.

Perhaps one of the most significant differences between Bacula and most other backup solutions is the advanced levels of security that Bacula offers. Used by many defense and military organizations around the globe, Bacula offers a level of protection that goes far deeper than many other providers in this space. The advantage is multiplied by its ability to fit all technologies in a typical IT environment, enabling users to protect their entire IT estate from a single pane of glass.

Conclusion

Cohesity has a rather impressive collection of features, but it would be unfair to say that it is the only solution on the market with a feature set this versatile. In fact, there are plenty of different competitors and alternatives to Cohesity, and we have managed to showcase a small part of those alternatives in the list above.

The final choice depends a lot on what kind of features your company is looking for. If you need a solution that has wide data management capabilities as a whole, choosing Commvault might be one option. Alternatively, if you’re willing to exchange some simplicity for a more versatile feature set, Druva could be more suitable for your use case. If you are looking for mature, efficient backup of VMware hypervisors, then Veeam could be the answer. Additionally, there is always Bacula Enterprise – an especially highly secure, fast and versatile solution with one of the biggest feature sets on the market and a rather convenient licensing model that does not include data volume caps. This licensing versatility makes it very attractive to medium and large organizations that need an especially reliable and broad-reaching product that can be customized to its exact needs.

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.