Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Arcserve UDP vs Zerto comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Arcserve UDP
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
19th
Ranking in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
10th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Zerto
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
2nd
Ranking in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
305
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Backup (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Disaster Recovery (DR) Software category, the mindshare of Arcserve UDP is 2.4%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 10.4%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
 

Featured Reviews

MukundKambli - PeerSpot reviewer
Global deduplication, stable, and flexible licensing options
I give the solution ten out of ten. This solution offers one dashboard to manage the BC con, disaster recovery plan, DR solution, and backup as well as different licensing options, unlike other OEM products. We are the system integrators for our clients, so we design the solution as per the customer's requirements. We provide several solutions options to our clients such as Druva inSync, Druva Phoenix, and Arcserve UDP with the specifications and the client makes a decision based on their requirements. I would advise potential users to first be clear on whether they are going to use it as a backup solution for compliance purposes, just wanting to take the backups of files and servers, or for instant recovery. The IQ and RPO discussion with our customers usually takes 30 minutes. I recommend this solution.
Sachin Vinay - PeerSpot reviewer
Leverage disaster recovery with reliable support and cost-effective future-proof features
Zerto is straightforward to implement because it only requires the installation of an agent on the VMs designated for migration. A service, typically a VM, must also be deployed at the disaster recovery location. This entire process is simple and can be completed within three days. Zerto's near-synchronous replication occurs every minute, allowing for highly granular recovery points. This means that even if interruptions or malware disruptions occur within that minute, Zerto can restore to the last known good state, effectively recovering the entire setup to the latest backup. This capability ensures high data security and minimizes potential data loss. One of the main benefits of implementing Zerto is its data compression, which significantly reduces the load on our IPsec VPN. Zerto compresses data by 80 percent before transmitting it across the VPN, minimizing the data transferred between geographically dispersed locations. This compression and subsequent decompression at the destination alleviate the strain on the VPN, preventing overload and ensuring efficient data synchronization. Zerto simplifies malware protection by integrating it into its disaster recovery and synchronization features. This comprehensive approach eliminates the need for separate antivirus setups in virtual machines and applications. It streamlines our security measures and removes the need for additional software or solutions, resulting in an excellent return on investment. Zerto's single-click recovery solution offers exceptional recovery speed. Through the user interface, a single click allows for a complete restoration from the most recent backup within two to three minutes, enabling rapid recovery and minimal downtime. Zerto's Recovery Time Objective is excellent. In the past, if a virtual machine crashed, we would recover it from a snapshot, which could take one to two hours. With Zerto, the recovery process takes only five minutes, and users are typically unaware of any disruption. This allows us to restore everything quickly and efficiently. Zerto has significantly reduced our downtime. When malware affects our data, Zerto immediately notifies us and helps us protect other applications, even those not yet implemented with Zerto. By monitoring these applications, we can quickly identify and address any potential malware spread, minimizing downtime across our systems. Zerto significantly reduces downtime and associated costs during disruptions. Our services are unified, so in the event of a disruption without Zerto, even a half-day disruption would necessitate offline procedures. This would lead to increased manpower, service delays, and substantial financial losses due to interrupted admissions and other critical processes. By unifying service processes, Zerto minimizes the impact of outages. Zerto streamlines our disaster recovery testing across multiple locations by enabling efficient failover testing without disrupting live services. Traditionally, DR testing required downtime of critical systems, but Zerto's replication and failover capabilities allow us to test in parallel with live operations. This non-disruptive approach ensures continuous service availability while validating our DR plan, even in scenarios like malware attacks, by creating a separate testing environment that mirrors the live setup. This comprehensive testing provides confidence in our ability to handle real-world incidents effectively. This saves us over 60 percent of the time. Zerto streamlines system administration tasks by automating many processes, thereby reducing the workload for multiple administrators. This allows them to focus on other university services that require attention and effectively reallocate support resources from automated tasks to those requiring more dedicated management. Zerto is used exclusively for our critical services, providing up to a 70 percent improvement in our IT resilience.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The standard backup and restore feature is most used."
"The product's deployment process was straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of Arcserve UDP is live replication."
"It is very stable."
"Arcserve UDP has a good configuration and user interface. It makes the job of an administrator easy."
"One of the things that I do like about it is that it has a very good deduplication feature."
"It is a very stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"The most valuable feature of Arcserve UDP is its decompression capability."
"It does what it's purported to do, which is to provide continuous data protection. We have a five-second RPO. It's definitely doing its job."
"I am quite familiar with the user interface. It is easy for me to operate and perform different operations because I am an experienced user. In my opinion, the user interface is easy to understand and operate. The user interface is user-friendly."
"With Zerto CDP, we can pull to our recovery objective in six seconds."
"It is very user-friendly. There is no wondering about what a feature does. It is easy to use."
"The features I find most beneficial about Zerto include continuous data protection, easy configuration, and simplified management with a user-friendly interface."
"The continuation to the public cloud has been especially helpful where I can pretty much work with things like hosts and clusters as part of the data center."
"The most valuable aspect of Zerto is the recovery speed."
"The Zerto university for training staff is very useful."
 

Cons

"It takes much time to verify and consolidate images for backups."
"Backups are very slow and time consuming."
"The solution could improve by being more user-friendly. It can be difficult to assign destinations and choose which files and folders we need to back up. There are some aspects that are unclear."
"The technical support of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The only problem with the solution is that when I change the drive capacity, it has to do a full backup. It's a problem when I have five servers to backup. When I only want to change the size of the drive, I have to do a full backup that can take one week."
"Every time I change the disc, I have to do a full backup."
"I had an issue with Arcserve UDP during the failover and the secondary machine didn't get back online, even though it ran automatically. I faced the issue during a crisis situation. However, I haven't faced such a problem again."
"One of the biggest drawbacks of Arcserve UDP is that it does not have a single console, making it an area that needs to be considered for improvement."
"We would love to have a native management pack for vROps and to be able to view a dashboard and metrics for BPGs within vROps. We would like to have a single view for monitoring and provide customers with dashboards so they can see their own BPGs."
"Automated protection of workloads from one site to another could be improved."
"Zerto added the backup feature, but it's not quite up to speed yet when you compare it with the backup capabilities of other solutions out there."
"We're not fully satisfied with the support team."
"The reporting could be improved in terms of the reports that you can show to auditors to prove that you have done the testing. I provide the reports that it generates now but, it would be great if, at the end of a DR test, it would generate a report of everything that Zerto did."
"When it comes to failover tests, we would like to be able to take that extra step to shut things down and see what it looks like at the other site versus just doing it in a virtual environment."
"Long-term retention of files is a function that isn't available yet that I'm looking forward to them providing. The long-term retention is the only other thing that I think needs improvement."
"Recently, they started forcing everybody to use a Linux-based appliance for their z/VMs. That appliance has been extremely touchy and, in some cases, problematic."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is based on the number of sockets. We use a four-socket price that includes two servers and the cost is $4,375."
"The solution is priced well compared to other solutions."
"The solution is very expensive."
"We only have the maintenance of three standard UDP licenses. Each license is 50 Euro. There are some additional costs for the storage and software but it has nothing to do with the UDP."
"Its price seems reasonable. Its price is average as compared to the other products I've looked at. We have a three-year license right now. There are no other costs beyond the standard licensing fee."
"The solution is not very expensive, but it is not cheap."
"There is an annual license required for this solution and it is priced well."
"The licensing cost is for one year. There are not any hidden costs involved in the pricing model of the solution."
"In a world where others are catching up, e.g., VMware High Availability, there needs to be a less expensive option as well. When a customer has approximately 100 VMs, if you multiply by 40, we aren't charging a very high margin on it at all since the license is so expensive. We feel their pain. That is the most expensive part of it. The storage, CPU, and RAM are a lot less. It is the licensing that is really expensive. Whereas, with an option like VMware High Availability, it is a couple dollars per month. That is our spend that we are charged by VMware, then our margin is higher on those VMs. Giving us some ability to have higher margins, as an MSP, would be a good thing."
"We feel it is pretty cost-efficient. For the amount of protection that we get for Zerto, we feel that it is at an excellent price point, especially compared to some of the other vendors that were just backup solutions. For all that it does, we feel that the price is good."
"This solution is far less expensive than SRM and NetBackup."
"Zerto does a per-workload licensing model, per-server. It is simple and straightforward, but it is not super flexible. It is kind of a one size fits all. They charge the same price for those workloads. I feel like they could have some flexible licensing option possibly based on criticality, just so we could protect less important work. I would love to protect every workload in my environment with Zerto, whether I really need it or not, but the cost is such that I really have to justify that protection. So, if we had some more flexibility, e.g., you could protect servers with a two-, three-, or four-hour RPO at a certain price point versus mission-critical every five minutes, then I would be interested in that."
"Pricing is kind of expensive, but for what we get, it is probably worth it. I know they just had a huge price increase due to the VMware stuff getting expensive, which added about a thousand dollars a month to our bill."
"Zerto is a little expensive."
"We found that in an event that was massive enough to cause an entire cluster to go offline we would be happy with our core services up and running."
"I do not like the current pricing model because the product has been divided into different components and they are charging for them individually."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Disaster Recovery (DR) Software solutions are best for your needs.
849,475 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user159711 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 9, 2014
VMware SRM vs. Veeam vs. Zerto
Disaster recovery planning is something that seems challenging for all businesses. Virtualization in addition to its operational flexibility, and cost reduction benefits, has helped companies improve their DR posture. Virtualization has made it easier to move machines from production to…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Non Profit
10%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Major Differences Between These 4 Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions?
Comparing the features of the four is not the right approach. You need to develop a list of requirements for backup and DR that are specific to your organization and then compare each of the four ...
What do you like most about StorageCraft ShadowProtect?
The interface is very refined, works fine, and is very intuitive most of the time. Scalability is nice. The multi-tenancy feature is very welcome. The integration with Linux works fine too.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StorageCraft ShadowProtect?
Pricing for SPX MRP/MSP is under $400 per server (Single VM) with a 1-year subscription. After discounts, it could decrease by 20%-30%, and opting for a 3/5/10 server pack may offer even better (lo...
What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?
Ik fluister:VM Host Oracle en DataGuard hebben we per toeval vervangen door Zerto :-) tijdens de Zerto implementatie en VPG werden de Host Data in write-ack Block-Level gerepliceerd. Qua licentie 1...
What do you like most about Zerto?
Its ability to roll back if the VM or the server that you are recovering does not come up right is also valuable. You have the ability to roll back a few seconds or a few minutes. The rollback feat...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zerto?
The setup is somewhat expensive. I'd rate the pricing seven out of ten.
 

Also Known As

StorageCraft ShadowProtect, StorageCraft Backup Analyzer
Zerto Virtual Replication
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ITPS, North Hertfordshire Homes, SEMIKRON, Kajaani University of Applied Sciences, Test Valley Borough Council, EK Services
United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
Find out what your peers are saying about Arcserve UDP vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,475 professionals have used our research since 2012.