One of the new backup competitors which have emerged – with new features – as an option to previously existing traditional storage vendors is Veeam. Veeam Backup Suite delivers availability for all computer environments (virtual, physical and cloud) from a single management console. In addition, it combines the standards of the industry, including the ability to backup and replicate the information (with the use of Veeam Backup Replication), with advanced mechanisms of monitoring, reporting and capacity planning. To cover these different functionalities, Veeam offers different versions and multiple licensing options to give you the functionality and flexibility for your business needs. Let’s take a look at some of the most known Veeam competitors.
Is your backup solution really secure?Veeam competitors in 2023. Veeam alternative solutions.
(17 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Veeam Main Features
- Administration of physical, virtual and cloud-based machines from a simple administration console.
- Easy granular recovery to specific levels of items or unitary elements of Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint and Active Directory.
- Restores of Oracle and SQL Server database on transaction-level.
- Use of snapshots for the execution of the policies of backups which reduces the backup time.
- Disaster recovery in the cloud: fully integrated, safe and easy with Veeam cloud connectors.
- Integrated acceleration of backups to the WAN, which allows to transfer data volumes and replicas to external sites at faster speeds.
- Backup repositories in different destinations, easily scalable with built-in deduplication and compression.
- Implementation of the policies and actions of disaster recovery with a single click and with minimal disruption of the operation.
Common Features Between Veeam and Competitors
- Simple and friendly administration, which allows users to perform configuration, operation and management activities according to the configured access levels.
- Ability to adapt to the diverse environments of operation which may include servers, storage devices, media libraries, local and remote resources, etc.
- Use of existing resources in enterprises, not only in the technical aspect, but also in the economic and financial aspect.
- Ability to grow with the company / organization, because of the easy adaptation to the needs of operation and information volumes that may arise, as well as requirements of users.
- Easy integration to the customer’s technology platform, for example for operation in network, sending notifications, using the information repository, generation of reports, etc.
- Implementation of different levels of backup that suit the policies and requirements of operation in enterprises. In addition to the traditional types used (full, differential, incremental), the software need to support backup consolidation.
- Storage of historical backup data in diverse and easily accessible repositories, with adequate levels of security and access, to be used for various purposes.
- Ease of use and management of resources in the cloud enabling the configuration of different destinations for backups in different operating environments.
Veeam Alternative Solutions & Their Features
In parallel with these new technologies, new approaches, paradigms and concepts have been incorporated into Veeam alternative solutions, which have boosted their popularity because of their specific benefits, among which are:
- Use of open source.
- Reduction and cost savings in relation to the resources used in backup solutions, such as media tapes, storage devices and server resources, etc.
- Existence of multiple management tools and data repositories for managing the data backup of organizations.
- The ability to grow efficiently, according to the requirements and needs in the company, arising from operational processes, or from user behaviour.
- Tools for the estimation of resources, not only in the area of technology but also to different organizational planning processes.
- The use of resources in the cloud, without a doubt has promoted activities of backup and recovery, by all the functionalities it offers to companies, such as:
- Storage volumes that contain backups at remote sites set mostly in environments of high availability and redundancy.
- Different providers to choose between those who offer cloud storage service, for example Amazon, Azure, Google, Microsoft, and those who offer their solutions for internet platforms specific managed by them.
- Access from different sites and places and from any platform.
- Scalability to the operation and information requirements of the organizations.
- Shared and secure storage environment.
- Encryption of the data, both in the process of copying the information, as well as in the volumes that contain the backups of the computers and servers.
- Some Veeam competitors offer a more scalable, effective and convenient licensing arrangement, combined with higher levels of support tailored for large enterprise requirements.
What people are saying about Veeam alternatives?
There are plenty of opinions about each and every backup solution out there, and Veeam is no exception. For example, this Reddit post on r/sysadmin seems to be quite positive towards Veeam as a whole, even if the topic starter was looking for Veeam alternatives in the first place! The original topic starter is looking for a solution to back up ESXi hosts and claims that Veeam asks an incredibly high price for its services.
There are multiple cases of people recommending Altaro, for example:
“I love Veeam, but Altaro might be worth a look. I have used it before for some smaller installs and it worked pretty well”
There are a few comments specifying the fact that Altaro is at its best with smaller businesses that only work with Windows-based environments. Other than that, users are praising its low price and the lack of trying to sell a premium or more-expensive-than-needed solution every single day.
There was also an interesting alternative that suggested using Veeam’s free version in an unusual manner:
“I mean with Veeam you can use their free version and schedule it all with powershell. You lose some incremental abilities but it still does most of the stuff.”
Comments for this particular suggestion go even further with providing actual links to a Veeam forum that have complete backup scripts for powershell. At the same time, one user reminded the rest that Veeam’s premium version is a lot more bandwidth-conservative and can provide low-bandwidth DR with its forever incremental backup type.
Unitrends also seems to be mentioned in this context at least once:
“We use Unitrends at our place, which does both guest and file-level restore. It’s not great tbh, it’s broken a few times in the past months, but it is cheaper than VEEAM.”
However, further comments seem to note the user’s dissatisfaction with the solution as a whole since a cheaper solution that takes more time to fix (and more manpower) is arguably more expensive in the end.
Quest vRanger is also a possible replacement for this particular case of ESXi backups:
“… if you’re looking at alternatives i can suggest quest vranger. it’s a simple software ONLY for small environments. It will NOT handle large environments very well.”
Further comments seem to be going in more detail about the solution itself and what it can do – very basic retention/scheduling, Changed Block Tracking support, an easy-to-use free trial version, and a somewhat unnerving lack of updates when a legacy feature gets removed (the removal of Windows Server 2003 backup capability is what the user in question offers as a example).
ghettoVCB seems to be the option that some people suggest when there is actually no budget on the backup solution, since this particular option is extremely difficult to work with and is only somewhat competitive when the user controlling it has a decent level of knowledge in both Linux systems and VMware virtualization.
Other, less discussed mentions of Veeam competitors include:
- Arcserve
- NAKIVO
- Commvault
- Trilead VM Explorer
- Zerto
- NovaStor DataCenter
There have also been plenty of comments suggesting to pay the price that Veeam asks, since this seems to be the best the market can offer:
“Just spend the money. Veeam is the best at what it does (imo, although I’m sure most other sysadmins would agree).”
“Honestly, just cough up the money for Veeam, there is a reason they are the market leader in their segment. Like below, you can pay per VM or per socket I believe. It’s not that expensive compared to the piece of mind it’ll give you.”
Although this particular page only discusses a very specific use case for Veeam, it is easy to see this as an example of how there are plenty of alternatives that could be found for practically any backup solution – even the one as popular as Veeam seems to be.
Veeam Competitors
Acronis Cyber Protect may sometimes be a possible alternative to Veeam, all things considered – it has a similar feature set in terms of data protection and backup capabilities, and Acronis can also perform a few of the more unconventional operations including working with virtualization, or imaging your entire system (creating a single image that contains the entirety of your system, including both user data and system information). Cohesity, on the other hand, allows its users to optimize their entire system with an entire array of products for data protection, data management, as well as compliance. It may be a great choice for customers that often experience bottlenecks in terms of IT silos, which Cohesity can work with or eliminate them altogether.
We will also use an assertive approach when comparing Veeam and its competitors, such as using data from famous software review websites. In this particular example, we are mostly going to use data from Gartner and Peerspot:
- Acronis Backup has a rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars with 305 reviews and is considered to be easier than Veeam in terms of first-time deployment and integration, as well as general customer support capabilities. It does have some issues with SQL database backups, and the overall list of supported databases and hypervisors could be more extensive compared with what competitors can offer.
- Cohesity DataProtect boasts a rating of 4.7 out of 5 based on 717 reviews, being priced fairly reasonably, and perhaps having a better overall deployment process than Veeam. At the same time, it has some issues when it comes to supporting legacy platforms, and there is a demand for more detailed documentation about the different capabilities of the solution.
- Veritas NetBackup is another well-known name on the market with a 4.8 out of 5 points rating with 662 reviews – it is considered somewhat more difficult to deploy compared with Veeam, and there are plenty of other challenges regarding user-friendliness that could be ironed out more. For example, its reporting capabilities leave a lot to be desired, the overall number of tools can be overwhelming when it comes to system administration tasks, and there is also apparently a rather long waiting time for any response from the customer support team.
- NAKIVO as a backup solution has 4.8 out of 5 stars on Gartner with 402 total ratings, it claims to be extremely easy to deploy and work with and has generally better scalability and automation capabilities. At the same time, NAKIVO lacks some of the more advanced reporting options, can be slow in specific circumstances, and its scheduling capabilities could be more user-friendly and detailed.
- Rubrik is also one of the highest-rated solutions on this list with 4.8 stars out of 5 and 664 user reviews. It provides more detailed reporting results across the board, and some users consider it to be well worth the high price, as opposed to Veeam which has a lot more users that are not particularly satisfied with the current pricing. At the same time, Rubrik is not a solution with the most user-friendly interface, and it also seems to be prioritizing VMware over Hyper-V and other VM’s when it comes to new features.
- Azure Backup is a Microsoft-owned solution, an addition to a popular cloud computing platform Azure which has 4.4 out of 5 stars with 115 reviews on Gartner. It seems to be a bit more user-friendly than Veeam, in terms of both initial installation and overall customer support. However, Azure Backup is also not without its own constraints, be it limited integration capabilities, the lack of immutable backup as a feature, a significant limitation on the number of files restored per day, and more.
- VMware SRM is a fairly new solution with a 4 out of 5 rating on Peerspot with a total of 19 reviews. It has a user-friendly interface and a good track record in disaster recovery. However, their technical support for customers could use more work, not particularly flattering RPOs for VMs, and it could also experience heavy load issues.
- Commvault has 426 reviews with a total rating of 4.4 out of 5, it is a versatile backup platform that has a clear pricing model that can also be flexible for different needs, and its integration/deployment capabilities seem to receive praise from end users. It can also be somewhat underperforming when the data is stored on a cluster or server that is far from the user’s location, and it can be rather challenging to make it compliant with different data security standards and procedures.
- Arcserve is a 4.6 out of 5 solution with 145 reviews that has plenty of useful features. As a backup solution, Arcserve is easy to deploy, it has a simple integration process with various systems and solutions, and a customer support team is always there to help with any potential issue or confusion. At the same time, Arcserve is extremely limited in what kinds of cloud storage providers and VM types it can work with, and the solution’s reporting capabilities were also reported as lacking.
- Dell Technologies is a backup solution from the technological giant, with 902 reviews and 4.7 out of 5 stars of the total rating. It is considered generally better than Veeam in terms of deployment and integration capabilities, and its customer support also has a lot of praise about how they perform. However, that same support seems to be rather inconsistent with how helpful they can be, and the overall GUI of the solution could use more work in terms of user-friendliness and functionality.
However, there is one specific alternative to Veeam that is worth its own segment in the article – especially for medium and large organizations, and that is Bacula Enterprise.
Bacula and Veeam are among new applications for backup that have emerged as alternative to the traditional, ‘legacy’ vendors and which make use not only of backup technologies, but also implement new concepts and opportunities for their operation that increase performance and efficiency, such as advanced management tools for interaction with the cloud, for example.
With Bacula being a highly flexible and complete backup solution, and with the features mentioned above, it has become an attractive choice as a Veeam competitor.
Bacula has a number of clear advantages from the others, but perhaps the single most important one is its especially high level of security compared to other backup and recovery vendors. The solution is, for this reason, relied on by the largest Western military and defense organizations, banks and governmental offices. It has a unique architecture that protects against ransomware and other malware, making it a must for organizations that need the highest levels of protection.
Bacula brings a set of other unique advantages that make it one of the best backup and recovery options to implement in a large and diverse professional organization. Among them are:
- The use of open source as a model for development and operation allows the user to take advantage of a technology that is in constant evolution, in addition to being easily adaptable to the changes arising, and its implementation does not significantly affect the operation and continuity of business.
- Advanced encryption, compression, deduplication, data poisoning detection, security dashboards, full integration with tape, disk and cloud storages,
- An especially broad range of features for virtual, container, physical and cloud environments.
- The ability to back up and quickly recover data from the one platform. Bacula covers practically all technologies, including many SaaS applications, in-cloud functionality and nearly all container technologies.
- Native integration with MySQL, MS SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MariaDB and SAP HANA
- Native integration with Hyper-V, VMware, Xen, Proxmox, Nutanix, Azure VM and KVM
- Best value for money, in a number of ways. Firstly, Bacula Systems does not charge by data volume. As a result, data centers and IT departments are free to grow in terms of data volume with no extra charges from Bacula for data volume, allowing them to keep costs to a minimum. Secondly, all data can be backed up and recovered from the one platform. Thirdly, Bacula’s annual subscription licensing model is low cost, and just as scalable as its architecture, multiplying its efficiency more than other solutions. Finally, Bacula’s support services are fast, with immediate access to senior support engineers, effectively reducing costs in the customers’ organization.
Conclusion
With many alternatives and competitors to Veeam on the market, it should be possible to find a software or solution for almost any potential backup-related use case. For example, solutions such as NAKIVO or Acronis may be easier to deploy, while Arcserve or Azure Backup would be a great fit for companies looking for good customer support in their Veeam alternatives.
Bacula Enterprise is a clear Veeam competitor that enables organizations to have a backup solution that meets all its requirements. High end users such as government, defense, Banks, large enterprises and national organizations generally need significantly higher levels of security than most (or all) of the previously mentioned vendors tend to provide. This is where Bacula comes in. Such are its security levels, that Bacula is relied on by the largest defense organization in the West, as well as the U.S. Military, and many navies around the world. It is readily adaptable to any potential new technologies that may appear in the future. Bacula is compatible with an especially large number of hypervisors, databases and storage destinations – far beyond most of its peers. It is highly customizable, and scales up to many thousands of servers. It is also controlled from a choice of management consoles and web-based GUI’s, where the user has access to all backup and recovery-related elements.Note that users need to have at least one Linux server to use Bacula, which is yet another reason for the high security quality of this software. Interestingly, Bacula offers a completely free open source version, as well as non-capacity-based licensing for the Enterprise paid version. This keeps costs significantly down for organizations with growing data volume.
