Home > Glossary > Rubrik vs Commvault vs Bacula Enterprise

Rubrik vs Commvault vs Bacula Enterprise

(17 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

Updated 4th May 2023, Rob Morrison

The fast shift to digitalization that a lot of industries went through a decade or two ago drastically changed the priorities of most companies in terms of cyber-security; since their digitized data and information quickly became their most valuable and important resource. This particular trend developed exponentially with each passing year. Now data is often the most valuable thing most companies own – which means that losing even a part of a company’s business data has the potential to ruin its entire business in a very short time frame.

As such, data protection measures are needed and there are plenty of different approaches to this topic already. Yet, data backup is still considered the staple of any data protection system, disaster recovery and business continuity strategy.

Data backup is a process of creating one or several copies of specific information for the sake of storing it separately from the original in order to restore it if or when necessary. There are different situations that could lead to a potential data loss or data corruption event – such as natural disasters, human error, impersonation, malware, ransomware, etc.

Download Bacula Enterprise trial
Check your backup solution essentials before choosing

Speaking of ransomware, some of the newer versions of this particular brand of malware are now more intelligent, capable of acting as “sleeper agents” or trying to find and encrypt/corrupt backups before attempting to go for the data source. This kind of never-ending battle of security systems and cyber criminals makes choosing an especially safe and secure backup solution for your company even more prevalent than ever before.

The overall market for backup solutions on an enterprise level is wide – and highly competitive – since every solution attempts to differentiate from others by adding more features and tactics to counter as many different potential scenarios as possible. As such, choosing a backup solution specifically for the sake of using it in your company can be difficult.

In order to try and help, we have compared a small selection of advanced solutions with each other, listing every solution’s benefits and shortcomings, and offering advice on where each solution would work the best. This is a Rubrik vs Commvault vs Bacula Enterprise comparison, and we will go over their features, benefits, use cases, disadvantages, and more.

Rubrik

Rubrik as a company was created in 2014 and is based in California, USA. It is a software provider company that offers data security and data management capabilities using the combination of software and hardware with extensive automation capabilities and support for different environment types (cloud, hybrid, physical, etc.).

Despite its relatively small age as a company, Rubrik has accumulated a large number of positive reviews from all kinds of clients and is widely considered one of the best solutions on the market – with a large emphasis on excellent RTO performances.

Rubrik works as a centralized backup and recovery platform that has plenty of features in a single package. Rubrik can be used to create and customize various backup policies and strategies, customizing retention, frequency, and other parameters. It can offer instant recovery capabilities and is compatible with cloud storage, virtual machines, and even databases.

Rubrik Main Features

Rubrik’s ransomware recovery capabilities are strong, offering both a clear visibility of the scope of the attack and a fast data recovery capability if an attack actually happens. Rubrik’s solution is able to return the system to a clean state (the latest backup copy) in a very short time period.

As a multifunctional solution, Rubrik also has useful centralized management capabilities, offering control over the entirety of your data and applications from a single location, combined with centralized reporting, good compliance monitoring, support for multiple cloud environments, and more.

Backup and recovery capabilities are reported to be possible for VM backups, database backups, and cloud backups with features such as immutability (albeit somewhat limited), disaster recovery, replication, archival, and more.

Rubrik Technical Details

Rubrik can work on Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems
Rubrik does not have a dedicated mobile app
Rubrik can be deployed on-premise, in the cloud, and using API

Rubrik Benefits

Short RTOs is one of the most notable features of Rubrik, with Continuous Data Protection across the board and service-level agreements across the entire data lifecycle.
Another notable feature of Rubrik is user-friendliness, with a universally-praised UI experience and versatile data management, as well as simple data restoration, customizable automatization, and easy cloud storage setup.
There are several ways to deploy Rubrik – in the cloud, with API, or on-premise, and it can also be integrated with Oracle databases, Active Directory, SharePoint, MS Exchange, and SQL Server.

Rubrik Shortcomings

While Rubrik does have AWS outposts support, there is no full integration with Amazon Web Services, which is an issue for many users.
Rubrik’s pricing is rather expensive and there is no public price available whatsoever, the only way to receive an approximate cost of the solution is to get a quote for your specific company.
Rubrik is reported to have limited SaaS and Active Directory backup capabilities.

Commvault Complete Data Protection

Commvault Complete Data Protection is a comprehensive data security platform that offers both data protection and data management capabilities to its clients. It managed to accumulate a good amount of praise over the years, with many reviews endorsing its feature list and general reliability. Scalability is also a significant part of Commvault’s capabilities, making it a great long-term solution for many company types. Commvault is focused on medium to large enterprises, meaning this solution may not be the best option for smaller companies or startups.

Commvault is capable of operating with different data types for backup purposes, be it Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud, Citrix Xen, etc. Its feature set includes native deduplication, mailbox protection, endpoint data protection, data archiving capabilities, hardware snapshot management, and operational reporting. It can work with Unix, Linux, Oracle, and Windows, as well as hypervisors and even application servers.

Commvault Main Features

One of the biggest draws of Commvault is its ability to perform data classification on its own, while also offering various insights about the current state of your system. This includes detecting and aligning business-critical data with higher security measures, removing obsolete and redundant data, speeding up consolidations and migrations, and even protecting critical data elements in order to lower the overall risk of ransomware.

Commvault has a unified interface for all of the backup and recovery operations, improving data management capabilities and creating a lot of centralization for the sake of visibility. Features such as rapid recovery, granular recovery, and all the other types of backup-related operations are protected using end-to-end encryption and various anti-ransomware measures. It is even possible to move data (or workloads) to and from cloud storage locations.

Commvault’s disaster recovery capabilities are also good, offering cost-effective and fast DR capabilities with features such as snapshot replication for VM, apps, and other storage types, one-click failover, the usage of scripts for DR management, and more. Combined with automated compliance reporting and sub-minute RTOs/RPOs, this makes Commvault one of the stronger solutions on the market.

Commvault Technical Details

Commvault offers native mobile applications for both iOS and Android devices
Commvault can be installed on Windows, Linux, Unix, and other OS types.
Commvault can be deployed both in the cloud and on-premise.

Commvault Benefits

Commvault’s data protection capabilities are comprehensive, utilizing the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence to optimize IT processes, mitigate data breaches, and detect anomalies within the system. This results in significantly improved services across the board, including governance, compliance, data protection, security, and more.
Commvault is well-known for its versatility, capable of providing a variety of backup operations for different workloads, from regular files to applications, databases, and even containers. Additionally, there is support for a variety of cloud deployments, combined with seamless integration with plenty of different storage types.
Commvault’s storage is distributed and supports writing data across several different locations and storage types at the same time, no matter what storage types are chosen – resulting in better data sovereignty, better compliance, and generally more stable infrastructure.

Commvault Shortcomings

There is little to no information about Commvault’s licensing model or its price available online, the only way to receive any of this information is to request a personalized quote.
Commvault is generally not designed with smaller companies in mind, the entire solution is built with large cloud providers and enterprises in mind.
Commvault’s Browse for Restore functionality is reported as not always giving desired results
Commvault is a fairly complicated system on its own, and its initial deployment can be surprisingly complicated – including many additional software appliances that are necessary for the system to function properly. For example, Commvault Orchestrate and Commvault Hyperscale are necessary for automation/scalability operations, and both have different initial setup processes.

Bacula Enterprise

Bacula Enterprise is well-known as one of the most secure and feature-rich solutions in the backup and recovery space. It can perform backup and recovery operations with physical and virtual storage types, as well as containers, cloud storage, and even edge environments. It is a great choice for larger companies and even enterprise-level data centers. Bacula can offer fast and reliable data recovery, while also being a goldmine of rare features, including NDMP device backup, NAS storage backup, Active Directory and Exchange cluster backup, as well as highly effective deduplication paired with remarkable reliability and vast data security capabilities.

Bacula Enterprise is capable of working with physical, virtual, and hybrid environments, offering snapshots and recovery tasks for a variety of storage types. It is a powerful backup and recovery solution that is also one of the only players on the market that has no limitations when it comes to data volumes that need to be backed up or recovered.This impressive scalability is further complemented by have no capacity-based licensing

Bacula Enterprise Main Features

Bacula Enterprise’s capabilities when it comes to supported environment types are exceptional, ranging from disks and practically all tapes, to cloud storage and other possibilities. It has native integration with AWS S3, bringing unprecedented versatility to both Windows and Linux users all over the world.

Bacula’s restoration capabilities are slick, offering quick recovery for documents, images, catalogs, and entire systems. It supports standalone BLS and bextract, and also allows for several different backups to be restored in a single location.

Aside from general backup and recovery capabilities, Bacula Enterprise is also an outstanding data security solution, offering multiple data encryption options, a tripwire-like internal structure of the data systems, and more. Bacula can detect any unauthorized data modification events, alerting necessary personnel about them or even performing specific actions automatically – a great choice for companies that deal with sensitive data on a regular basis. As an indication of the levels of security Bacula offers, it is relied on by the largest military and defense organizations in the West.

Bacula Enterprise Technical Details

Bacula Enterprise can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud, as well as into edge environments
Bacula Enterprise has a dedicated mobile application available for Android devices
Bacula Enterprise supports 34 different operating system versions, including, but not exclusive to Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows, macOS, Debian, Red Hat, and many others.

Bacula Enterprise Benefits

Outstanding customer support is a notable feature of Bacula because there are plenty of solution providers in this market that fail to meet the requirements of their users in this regard. Bacula offers highly personalized attention to every single customer of theirs and the support itself is available 24/7.
Bacula can offer true backup and recovery speed, also allowing for multiple backups to be performed at the same time with minimum or no performance loss, while also constantly verifying existing data and services to monitor if all of them are still untouched or up and running.
Bacula’s range of integrations is deep and broad, including various data types, integrations, applications, virtual machine providers (Xen, Hyper-V, Proxmox, VMware, Nutanix, KVM, etc.), containers (Openshift, Kubernetes, Docker, etc.), databases (MySQL, SAP HANA, Oracle, MSSQL, PostGRES, etc.), and more.

Bacula Enterprise Shortcomings

Bacula Enterprise has a rather shorter update cycle than some, meaning that new updates to improve security and add features are rolled out more frequently. As such, users may have to install all of these updates regularly to stay completely up to date.
One of the ways that allows Bacula to work with this licensing model is that some of the more uncommon and rare integrations require additional purchases. On the other hand, it means this modular licensing system means a user only pays for what they actually use.
It is true that Bacula Enterprise’s number of different features is remarkably high – but this kind of versatility can also be a downside for some of the less experienced users since it takes a little time to figure out how Bacula’s own GUI operates (since it is similar to Linux in its structure).

Rubrik vs Commvault vs Bacula Enterprise

Rubrik vs Commvault vs Bacula Enterprise are all completely different solutions that have their own weaknesses and advantages. As such, it is not necessarily possible to decide which is simply the best one – but instead see what use cases every solution works best with.

Why Rubrik

Rubrik’s customer support has a good track record and the overwhelming majority of the customer reviews praise 24/7 customer support availability, if nothing else. Rubrik’s Live Mount feature is also extremely popular, making it easy to restore entire VMs in a matter of seconds – and it even works on databases. This is a stark contrast with legacy VM recovery solutions that can take hours to restore some of the larger backups.

Why Commvault

Commvault is an excellent enterprise backup solution with a wealth of different features from integrations with a variety of storage types to backup and recovery centralization for easier reporting and monitoring. It also has vast automation capabilities, works with multi-cloud and hybrid environments, has excellent analytical capabilities assisted by the combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and more. All in all, Commvault is a scalable and reliable backup solution that has its issues, and yet remains one of the most prominent players in the enterprise backup market.

Why Bacula Enterprise

Despite the fact that Bacula Enterprise’s biggest draw might be its versatility in terms of backup features, it is also regarded as practically the most secure data management platform available today. Its core engine runs on Linux, it has immutable volumes, Time-based One-Time Passwords, Two-Factor Authentication, automated system checks, a secure antivirus solution, and a core code that is open source – which delivers even higher levels of security. It is also sold based on per-server cost, without data volume counting in any way. This allows Bacula to be equally useful to small and large businesses, and especially to MSPs and large data centers that have significant data volume environments. Bacula is a broadly powerful solution that offers extensive security and a massive list of features with very few drawbacks.

Which is better: Rubrik, Commvault, or Bacula Enterprise?

Rubrik serves as a good centralized platform for various software and hardware components for backup purposes, although it may have some ransomware weaknesses. It is also fairly new to the market, lacks full AWS integration, and its price is well above the market average. Commvault can mitigate the risk of ransomware, accelerate data migrations, perform various backup and recovery operations – and yet it can be somewhat problematic to set up initially, and the solution itself is only geared towards middle-sized and large businesses, with sometimes complicated configurations. Bacula Enterprise, on the other hand, is a backup solution with extremely impressive performance, a wide range of integrations, and a system of modules to expand its capabilities even more – but it can take some learning initially, even though the learning experience is worth it in the end. Bacula is a solution best suited for those with some Linux knowledge.

Bacula Enterprise is a great backup and recovery solution across the board, especially useful to companies that operate with large data volumes across different platforms on a regular basis. For the “high end” or demanding user, Bacula is fast and secure, offers an exceptionally high number of integrations and approaches, and can operate with practically any environment type – be it physical, cloud, hybrid, multi-cloud, Container, or any combination thereof.

While it is true that practically every IT environment has its own unique collection of problems and challenges, Bacula Enterprise offers an especially secure, convincing solution capable of preventing or mitigating the majority of well-known security-related and backup-related issues that a company may have. Bacula’s unusual degree of flexibility makes it a favorite with some of the more unconventional organizations – data centers, international government organizations, MSPs, High Performance Computing centers and national laboratories. At the same time, its licensing model makes it compatible with most company types, from smaller businesses to large corporations, to very large enterprises – so reducing costs in a way that is sustainable and realistic.

Bacula Enterprise is an excellent backup and recovery solution, ideal if you need to store large amounts of data and be able to recover it quickly. The platform is reliable, very robust, and supports numerous integrations such as databases and visualization tools. It was also developed to be cost-effective, making it an excellent option for medium and large businesses alike.

Download Bacula Enterprise trial
Plan your disaster recovery

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.