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Azure Backup vs NetApp SnapCenter 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

Azure Backup
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
10th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp SnapCenter
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
50th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Azure Backup is 3.4%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp SnapCenter is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

RituparnaBhattacharya - PeerSpot reviewer
Achieve cost savings and efficiency with high-level restore capabilities
I use Azure Backup mainly for backing up virtual machines The feature I find most effective in Azure Backup is the high-level restore. Additionally, it has a good impact on our cost savings and operational efficiency as it is a low-cost solution. The area that I believe needs improvement in…
Mir Gulzar Ahmed - PeerSpot reviewer
Integrates well with various applications , provides a cloning feature for creating snapshots or clones of volume and a centralized command
It is basically centralized command control software. When the users visualize the workflow of the backup, the management and the customer storage administrator know the ins and outs of the backup and recovery. They can make the strategy for their backup and recovery and the certainty of their backups and restore. Strategic planning: Also, it is easy to make a strategy when you have visualized the inflow and outflow of the backup and recovery. With the CLI or native way, without any UI or management tool, you might not be able to create any strategy at all. This is especially important when you have multiple storage systems inside your data center or organization. You need a tool that connects and visualizes the workflow of the backup and recovery from all the storage systems and NetApp storage systems installed within the organization. It is very important when you have multiple storage systems, and you need to manage your backup and recovery workflow. Ease of Management: Unlike other storage vendors, NetApp has its own product called SnapCenter. Other vendors need to acquire third-party software or integrate with other software to manage storage systems. NetApp has its own solution, which is SnapCenter. NetApp's SnapCenter gels well with their storage systems and products. Ease of management is already there. It's a fine software with easy installation, management, and understanding. It's not a complicated software to understand.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With Azure Backup, you can readily make your environment if your setup somehow fails on the cloud or on-premises."
"The backup features are very useful."
"Azure Backup is good because it is entirely cloud-based, which means that you can be 99.9% sure that your backup is safe."
"The setup of Azure Backup is very easy."
"The product is very reliable and easy to use."
"You can select the tiering for your backup and manage your cost."
"The MARS agent makes it easy to use."
"Azure Backup is very simple to use and user-friendly."
"Most banks and financial institutions use the solution."
"The Exchange plugin is the most valuable because we have a lot of customers that use SnapManager Exchange and have to migrate to SnapCenter."
"It's a centralized, easy-to-use solution empowering RBAC management, monitoring, notifications, extensive logging, and backup schedules for standalone as well as groups of the same types of environments. The cloning capabilities accelerate development."
"The product’s most valuable feature is cloning."
"It's integrated with VMware vCenter. You can also see the backups there and you can do a restore completely out of vCenter."
"It allows us to easily take a Snapshot and use it with any backup tools. We can also take Snapshots on the application side. We can also take Snapshots on the application side. If we want to restore an SAP or an Oracle machine, a normal Snapshot won't do it, but we can do so with SnapCenter."
"The simplicity of backup and restore directly with VMware is an advantage and the time to backup and restore is reduced."
"Being able to add everything in as resource groups is a valuable feature... Having all the SQL servers put into specific buckets, based on their year of release - 2008, 2012, 2014 - allows us to get almost immediate backups that are easily seen and reported on."
 

Cons

"The solution is still in its infancy; it's not a mature product yet."
"The extensibility onto hybrid environments needs a bit of tweaking for those on-prem."
"The length of time it takes to restore is our main source of frustration. It would be beneficial to shorten the time it takes."
"Connection with more legacy data services could be beneficial as some are currently unsupported."
"Azure Backup needs improvements in allowing more specific backup options rather than just full VM snapshots. It lacks features for cybersecurity, such as ransomware protection."
"I would like to see more automation, integration, and security. The price could be better."
"Microsoft's technical support for Azure products could be improved."
"Azure Backup could improve the backup data copies because they are not immutable."
"Reporting of the jobs could be better."
"The GUI is still so-so. I' don't use the GUI that often anymore because it's really slow, refreshing disks, refreshing hosts, and you have to click a lot."
"We have experience some difficulties with our current support. We are engaging in engineering level support because some of our problems are more technical."
"The DBAs are comparing it to SMO but it doesn't have a lot of the functionalities that SMO has."
"The Dashboard view needs to be more compressed with better ease of access and drill-down features. They should also reinstate Linux filesystem backups of storage volumes (which existed in the prior version)."
"I have an issue with SnapCenter because sometimes a VM cannot be backed up... The way SnapCenter works is that it makes a backup of all the VMs and then it removes all the old backups. If one VM cannot be backed up for some reason, it has already created a new backup for all the VMs but it cannot remove the old backups. It ends up creating so many backups in VMware and it will cause a performance problem if the condition is not fixed."
"Groups might be helpful for each site or data center so that we know a given data center has these resources while another data center has those resources. It's not always easy to group hosts by type."
"I feel a little bit that during the whole process of putting this software into production we were like a beta program. It was full of bugs... For example, we had a problem with truncating our Exchange log files... It has improved over time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is pretty good, maybe $30 for a machine, I can't complain."
"Overall, its cost is better because the VMs are already there, and whatever you back up, there is only the additional cost of that storage, whereas if I have to use Avamar in Azure, a separate cost is there for the Avamar server, and in addition, whatever I take as a backup, there is a separate license with Avamar for that. So, there is a double cost if we have to use Avamar in the cloud."
"We have enterprise-level pricing. I rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"Support payment works by the level of partnership and the number of shares."
"We do not have any additional costs for Azure Backup."
"Considering the fact that our company's enterprise-sized customers use the solution, the product's price is fine and is not on the higher side of the spectrum."
"Azure Backup can be expensive if you are not vigilant about your storage steering."
"Pay as you go is the pricing model."
"It's free. The license is included with other NetApp products."
"The licensing is well-designed because it's already included in some packages with NetApp storage. Therefore, for most customers, it's okay as the SnapCenter license is already included in some NetApp bundles."
"We have a site license, so it comes with the product."
"Pricing is very good because if you already have NepApp controllers, then it's included."
"It comes free with the amount of equipment we purchase from NetApp. In terms of pricing, zero is my favorite number."
"The license for SnapCenter was included with the storage array."
"We see a financial value with SnapCenter because we don't have to license Commvault, which is pretty expensive."
"The product is inexpensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
19%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Azure Backup differ from Veeam Backup & Replication?
Veeam has a version for Azure but there are organizations, like ours, that are considering moving to an Azure environment and wonder if Azure Backup is better than Veeam Backup and Replication (Vee...
What do you like most about Azure Backup?
Azure Backup is easy to configure and restore.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Backup?
The pricing of Azure Backup is fine; it is a low-cost solution.
What do you like most about NetApp SnapCenter?
Most banks and financial institutions use the solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp SnapCenter?
The product should be free because it is just software to administrate systems purchased from NetApp, which are already expensive.
What needs improvement with NetApp SnapCenter?
The interface usability needs improvement. It should be more user-friendly and easier for customers to use.
 

Also Known As

No data available
SnapCenter
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Russell Reynolds Associates, Somerset County Council, Kardem, PCL Construction
All for One Steeb AG, Accenture
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Backup vs. NetApp SnapCenter and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,471 professionals have used our research since 2012.