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Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
3.7
Amazon EFS offers scalable, cost-effective storage with minimal maintenance, enhancing productivity and benefiting businesses through pay-as-you-go pricing.
Sentiment score
6.2
CTERA's platform saves time and reduces costs, eliminating SSD needs and manual storage, with a two-year expense recovery.
Adding SSD storage to Windows file servers is expensive, and we no longer need to back up those devices.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
I am positive that CTERA has helped reduce the total cost of ownership by eliminating the need for manual storage management and reducing storage service processes.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.5
Customers find Amazon EFS support reliable, though resolution times may vary based on the complexity and support plan.
Sentiment score
7.9
CTERA's support is highly rated for its accessibility, quick response, knowledgeable team, and effective global storage management.
While the time to respond was good, the time to resolve was not optimal, as it took more than a week.
Regional Manager at Aspire Lifestyles
Amazon's support model is consistent across services.
AWS Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Training and support depend on the plan you have, with centralized support being very helpful in case issues arise.
Head of Engineering - Data and Machine Learning at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
They swiftly address concerns and take ownership of the call, providing a very satisfactory support experience.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
The quality and speed of support for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is some of the best in the industry.
Senior Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
High-priority issues are handled promptly.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.6
Amazon EFS offers scalable and cost-effective file storage, but users occasionally face challenges with scalability, latency, and connections.
Sentiment score
7.6
CTERA's platform excels in scalability and flexibility, supporting global use with easy upgrades, despite minor licensing challenges.
Its auto-scaling feature is a crucial point, providing high scalability that I would rate at ten out of ten.
Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group
Elastic File Systems allow me to scale up or down easily.
Data Engineer at Softtech Cloud Technologies
It is very cost-effective, and there's no need for initial charges.
Head of Engineering - Data and Machine Learning at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
If we need to upgrade CPU and memory, we should be able to do that without a license upgrade.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow.
Senior Manager of Global Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It offers good scalability options, including vertical and outward scalability.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Amazon EFS is generally stable, with users praising reliability, though some report minor issues mitigated by strong support.
Sentiment score
7.3
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is stable, with resolved issues and occasional sync problems not disrupting overall reliability.
Amazon EFS is extremely stable, as it is managed by AWS.
Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group
While I experienced an EFS mount dropping, it was related to server issues rather than EFS itself.
AWS Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It has been pretty stable since then.
System Administrator at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
We had things deployed for years, and we were suddenly getting cloud sync issues that were crashing our sites.
Senior Manager of Global Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It is very stable and reliable.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon EFS needs improved connectivity, Windows integration, cost transparency, and one-click setup for enhanced user experience and support.
CTERA could improve monitoring, updates, user portals, logging, data distribution, legacy upgrades, AI integration, file editing, and permissions.
Database-type workloads do not run properly on Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) because at the end of the day, it is a network file system and requests must travel from one place to another and then return.
Sr. Technical Account Manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
Enabling AI-driven or automatic features would be beneficial for new or nontechnical users.
Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group
In my project, there are challenges related to AWS, such as ensuring proper security measures with IMS code and encryption.
Data Engineer at Softtech Cloud Technologies
AI and automation features could enhance the platform, such as AI-powered search, predictive storage analytics, and intelligent alerts for proactive monitoring.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
The main problem is that if two people are working on the same file, for example, one in the U.S. and one in Israel, they can overwrite each other’s work without any notification.
CEO at rtt.co
It would help to have a global single-pane-of-glass view of all my CTERA devices.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EFS charges based on usage with higher costs compared to S3, making it less budget-friendly.
CTERA offers affordable enterprise file services, reducing total ownership costs compared to EMC, NetApp, and Nasuni, enhancing market accessibility.
EFS could cost around $30 to $50 per month for similar usage.
Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group
Amazon EFS is more costly compared to other storage options available from AWS.
AWS Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Elastic File Systems can be expensive due to the nature of data transfer costs.
Data Engineer at Softtech Cloud Technologies
Unlike other solutions that require hardware purchases, CTERA offers software licensing with flexibility across multiple infrastructure providers.
Business Development Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
CTERA’s pricing should be more proportional and accessible so that cost is not the factor preventing customers from purchasing.
CEO at rtt.co
CTERA's pricing seems to be on par with some of the other players, such as Nasuni and Azure.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EFS provides scalable, secure, and flexible storage with fast data access, auto-scaling, and seamless AWS integration for dynamic workloads.
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform offers scalable, flexible data management with seamless backup, user-friendly interface, and reliable recovery.
Its ease of integration with other AWS services enhances our infrastructure, while the shared storage access improves reliability and processing continuity for our applications.
AWS Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
They help me process data while maintaining low latency, which is crucial for efficient data processing.
Data Engineer at Softtech Cloud Technologies
The most valuable feature of Amazon EFS is its auto-scaling capability.
Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group
As soon as something is written to the device, CTERA copies it to the cloud, where it's versioned with snapshots so we can recover it.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
A vital advantage of this platform is its instantaneous recovery capability, allowing seamless access to a secondary gateway if the primary one fails.
Business Development Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
It is a three-in-one solution for us. It is a file-sharing platform, an archiving solution, and also a backup solution.
System Administrator at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EFS (Elastic File Sy...
Ranking in Cloud Storage
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
File and Object Storage (10th)
CTERA Enterprise File Servi...
Ranking in Cloud Storage
5th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (2nd), NAS (4th), Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Backup (8th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (8th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st), Content Collaboration Platforms (10th), AI Legal & Compliance (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Storage category, the mindshare of Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) is 3.3%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 3.5%, up from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Storage Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform3.5%
Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)3.3%
Other93.2%
Cloud Storage
 

Featured Reviews

MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group
Auto-scaling capabilities enhance file management while reducing downtime
The most valuable feature of Amazon EFS is its auto-scaling capability. It's really easy to configure EFS by just creating it and running a command to directly configure it with my servers. It supports unlimited use, and charges are applied based on the file usage at the end of the month. The solution offers reduced downtime and increased durability through its auto-scaling features.
Tim M. - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Supports global file recovery and rapid data versioning across 80 nodes
When we implemented CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform early on, and we've been on the platform for three years, we have three different cloud portals. We have an EU portal, we have an Americas portal, and we have an APAC portal. It would be nice if we could combine that into one portal just for that global single pane of glass look. We've talked with them about that and they say it's challenging just because of some of the structure, but that would be something nice if we could get that. I integrated with Varonis, and because CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform didn't have initially a working relationship with that vendor, it would have been nice had that pre-existed us saying we need this. But that wasn't totally CTERA's fault. There was a lot of challenge working with the vendor to build out that interface. A single pane of glass for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform would be beneficial. Everything else works fairly well. We've never had a point where we couldn't get to something that caused us to have a serious outage, and that to me is the mark of a good software package. It's never really caused us serious issues. We have our issues, that's true, and every software package does. However, we've always been able to meet the needs of the business, and we drive hard on security, stability, and scalability. From the scalability standpoint, that's one of the most important things to us. We're on their capacity-based licensing, so if I need to ramp up another CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform NAS, if we have an M&A, I can easily and quickly spin up another NAS and start doing that data transition fairly quickly. The biggest maintenance issue with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is firmware upgrades. We've done a lot of transition from hardware solution to virtualized infrastructure in order to minimize that hardware lifecycle portion of it. We have to upgrade the firmware and sometimes that can be challenging in the nature of business of our size with 80 CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform nodes around the globe. The issue we've had with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform happened recently in a firmware upgrade where there was a major database back-end upgrade and that took some time. For our smaller sites, it would be an hour or two, and I can build that into a fairly easy change window. But in our larger sites where we may have hundreds of terabytes of data, that database update process took maybe a day or a day and a half. That becomes more challenging, especially in a manufacturing environment where people are wanting to access configuration files. We had to pin the data locally because the data would be available on the local edge filer, but the cloud sync, while it was updating the database, the cloud files weren't available. That would be the other thing I'd like to see an improvement on: some way to do those database upgrades either in a more segmented fashion or in some type of offline environment. I understand the logistics behind that sounds easy, but I'm sure it's not.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Computer Software Company
65%
Outsourcing Company
5%
Educational Organization
4%
Financial Services Firm
3%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

Which file storage system is better - Amazon EFS (elastic file storage) or Azure File Storage?
Amazon EFS is easy to set up: you can use the AWS management console, API, or command-line. Amazon EFS can grow to petabytes and deliver consistent low latencies and high levels of throughput. This...
What do you like most about Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)?
The product's initial setup phase is easy, as per the configurations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EFS (Elastic File System)?
We don't need to purchase it; we are just using it and paying Amazon as per the utilization. We make direct payments to Amazon based on our usage.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
I believe CTERA could improve their pricing experience by customizing price lists per region. For example, there is a difference between what is sold to customers in Israel versus U.S. customers. I...
What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
When we implemented CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform early on, and we've been on the platform for three years, we have three different cloud portals. We have an EU portal, we have an America...
What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
We have approximately 80 nodes around the world and we're using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform mostly for unstructured file storage.
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Arcesium, Atlassian, Seeking Alpha, Zend
McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.