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13,533 views|10,791 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
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Read 234 Zerto reviews
10,524 views|5,722 comparisons
98% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 19, 2023

We compared Azure Backup and Zerto based on user reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.

  • Features: Azure Backup is commended for its scalability, comprehensive security options, and non-disruptive backup process. Users also like its seamless integration with various Azure services. Users say Zerto offers excellent data protection, and it’s easy to create VMs. Zerto users also like its real-time replication features. Azure Backup needs to improve its backup and file-level restoration procedure. Zerto could improve cloud environment configuration, PowerShell scripting, and multi-site replication.

  • Service and Support: Azure's customer service is generally considered helpful and proactive, but a few users have reported longer wait times and slow issue resolution. Customers have generally had positive experiences with Zerto's customer service, noting their quick response times and ability to resolve issues. Some customers have encountered slower response times and needed to go through multiple levels of support to get their issues resolved.

  • Ease of Deployment: Azure Backup's setup is easy, quick, and can be completed with minimal user involvement. The setup process for Zerto can be either simple or complicated, depending on the individual's experience with backup solutions.

  • Pricing: Azure Backup is a cloud-based solution, so its pricing depends on factors like storage and data consumption. Azure offers competitive pricing and is considered more cost effective than many competing solutions. Zerto’s price tag is considered reasonable and in line with industry norms. Others said it was somewhat expensive but still worth the cost.

  • ROI: Azure Backup offers a solid return on investment with its affordable pricing and low initial costs, particularly when upgrading solutions. Zerto reduces risks while saving costs and time. It increases efficiency, ensures compliance, and helps businesses grow.

Comparison Results: Azure Backup is an affordable, scalable solution that features an effortless deployment and native integration with Azure services. While reviews of Azure Backup’s features were generally positive, some users reported unsatisfactory experiences with Azure support. Zerto offers top-tier data protection, excellent customer service, and real-time replication, but some users say its cloud and multi-site functionality could be better.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Backup vs. Zerto Report (Updated: March 2024).
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The backup features are very useful.""The deployment process is quite easy in Azure.""When it comes to Azure Backup, the advantage is that it's native and it's very easy to configure. We don't require a separate tool or manage something on a separate server. At the backend, it's managed by Microsoft itself, and we don't need to manage it.""I like that it's a simple system.""Our client’s infrastructure is protected by the tool.""The most valuable features of Azure Backup for us are its flexible retention options and the ability to recover to a second region with geo-replication and read access.""The product is very reliable and easy to use.""First of all, you can schedule a backup for the client. You can schedule it as you like. You can also control the bandwidth, so the backup will not utilize. The internet will depend on the bandwidth."

More Azure Backup Pros →

"Using Zerto for the migration was incredibly valuable, enabling us to save tremendous amounts of time.""Zerto is easy to use and the interface is very intuitive.""Zerto enables us to do sandboxing failovers. You can run tests on a production environment in a sandbox and spin up a copy of your actual production environment in a few hours. When you're done with it, you can click a couple of buttons, and it's all blown away. You don't need to worry about reverting changes or interfering with your on-prem production environments.""It enables protection of a virtual workload to be done by the app, whether single or multi-tiered, with a boot time scheduler. It is pretty awesome.""The replication piece with the built-in WAN compression is important because the network circuit that we send our replication traffic across isn't actually behind our normal WAN accelerators. We were able to use Zerto's built-in WAN acceleration to help those workloads compress.""The most valuable feature of this solution is the live migration.""From a management perspective, one of the biggest benefits is to see the excitement of your engineers having a tool that truly enables them, really making their lives easier. That is something that I love. When we came out of the PoC, their eyes were just wide with excitement of what was possible now.""During a failover to a DR site, Zerto can automatically change the IP address of servers."

More Zerto Pros →

Cons
"I would like to have the option to increase the frequency of the backups. Azure Backup does backups on an hourly basis, but I would prefer it to take backups more often.""The Azure Backup support for on-premises service is limited.""I can’t use the solution to restore another native cloud solution. Azure must add this new feature.""The solution is quite technical. I wouldn't describe it as user friendly. It could be simplified a lot to make it more accessible to the average user.""In Avamar, the file-based restores are very quick and fast, whereas, in Azure Backup, VM restore is super easy, but if I have to do a file or a folder restore, I have to mount the entire VM image. I have to wait for some time for it to be mounted, and then I have to go inside and then check the file and copy it somewhere. It's a bit of a manual process, whereas in Avamar, you can directly select a file and folder, and it'll recover with whatever permissions you want.""They need to improve the frequency of the backup. You can only backup one to three times a day. It would be better to back up continuously throughout the day.""Azure lacks sufficient solutions for a particular scenario, we may need to resort to using third-party applications. In such cases, these applications can be employed to facilitate backup, replication, and the efficient utilization of internet connectivity and bandwidth. They enable us to effectively manage and transfer data while ensuring optimal utilization of network resources. However, it would be a benefit if we did not have to use third-party applications for these operations.""I once tried restoring a Linux environment, and the size of the Linux VM or the data disk was really huge. It took a really long time to restore the environment and send the data from the storage to the disk. It took around 25 to 30 minutes, which was much longer than I anticipated. They can improve the duration of such restore operations. In the next release, it would also be good if they could reduce the duration for transferring the data from their storage to the actual storage while creating a virtual machine. They can reduce the duration or increase the data transfer rate."

More Azure Backup Cons →

"The full site recovery is not up to SRM standards.""The biggest improvement would be exporting VPGs and a configuration of VPGs, as well as increasing or improving their IP customization rule set.""It would be beneficial if Zerto also offered integration with other cloud management platforms, such as VMware Aria Automation.""I would like to see a separate product offer for performing backups, although I think that this is something that they are expecting to release in the next version.""The replication appliances tend to have issues when they recover from being powered off when a host is in maintenance mode. Sometimes you have to do a manual task where you go in and detach hard disks that are no longer in use, to get the replication appliances to power back on. There are some improvements to be made around the way those recover.""It has some quirks. We have quirks with appliances. Some things don't really work as expected, but it is minor.""When building out a VPG and doing the machine types within Azure, they were not coming across correctly. It would say it had a CPU and memory of a specific type, but it was not accurate... It was a bug and they were working on it.""If I had to pick anything, it would be the documentation for upgrades. They need to make it easier for users to do upgrades without having to contact support, by providing better documentation for that."

More Zerto Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The pricing of this solution is ok, but I'm expecting that the price will decrease in the future."
  • "The pricing of this solution is good, and it is one of the easiest things that you can sell Azure with."
  • "This is an expensive solution in the Bangladesh marketplace."
  • "We are paying about $100,000 USD per year, just for a couple of servers."
  • "The price is pretty good, maybe $30 for a machine, I can't complain."
  • "It is a bit costly initially, but it is well worth it in the long run, especially for fighting against a number of threats, such as ransomware, which the IT industry is facing."
  • "Price-wise, it's similar to AWS."
  • "The price is somewhat high and could be lower."
  • More Azure Backup Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Pricing depends on your future growth. Start small and then scale up."
  • "Zerto’s licensing model has changed a bit over the last year and they are in alignment with others. It is pretty simple and more economical."
  • "Licensing is based on the number of VMs to replicate. The first thing should be to get the number of VMs to replicate based on your business needs."
  • "Licensing is VM based so you can buy packages or single VM. Price is not low but the power of application is high, so you will get your money back."
  • "It's a little bit expensive."
  • "We believe the pricing, setup costs, and licensing are easy to understand. The pricing seems very reasonable."
  • "The solution is very cost-effective and very easy to set-up but does not compromise on features."
  • "While we find the twenty-five VM license somewhat inflexible, the actual setup costs are minimal as the product is so easy to install."
  • More Zerto Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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 (Veeam… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable features of Azure Backup for us are its flexible retention options and the ability to recover to a second region with geo-replication and read access.
    Top Answer:I would rate the pricing of Azure Backup around six or seven out of ten in terms of affordability, considering the total cost. The pricing depends on factors like storage choices and retention needs… more »
    Top Answer: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 =… more »
    Top Answer: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 feature… more »
    Top Answer:The pricing is based on virtual machines. They need to do better in regards to their tiering pricing rather than one price per VM. A lot of times we have VMs that are lower tier, such as Tier 2 or… more »
    Ranking
    7th
    out of 133 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    13,533
    Comparisons
    10,791
    Reviews
    28
    Average Words per Review
    470
    Rating
    8.1
    2nd
    out of 133 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    10,524
    Comparisons
    5,722
    Reviews
    126
    Average Words per Review
    925
    Rating
    9.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Zerto Virtual Replication
    Learn More
    Overview

    Azure Backup is a scalable backup solution with zero capital investment and minimal operational expenses that can help a company achieve maximal data protection. Azure Backup’s System Center Data Protection Manager provides optional integrations that can enable you to protect both advanced workloads running in your datacenter in VMs as well as those that are on physical servers.

    Azure Backup has many features that make it a most effective product. Included among these is its ability to easily scale up your storage capacity. It taps into the cloud to give you the ability to expand on a massive scale. This can be done without any monitoring or maintenance overhead.

    Benefits of Azure Backup

    Some of the benefits of using Azure Backup include:

    • The ability to control and track the performance of your network from a single centralized location. Azure Backup has a “single pane of glass” interface that enables users to monitor, operate, govern, and analyze their backups from one place. This eliminates any need to add additional management infrastructure. You can manage different workload types, subscriptions, vaults, and regions with Azure’s Backup Center.

    • A wide array of security features allows you to prevent malicious users from doing damage to the system, receive alerts if an unauthorized action takes place, and recover from any damage that results. Azure Backup has authentication requirements built in to protect vital functions, such as the ability to delete backed up data from unauthorized users. If something that impacts the backed up data takes place, users are immediately notified. Azure Backup saves any and all deleted backup data for two weeks. This enables administrators to use recovery points to recover their lost data.

    Reviews from Real Users

    There are a number of characteristics that make Azure Backup extremely effective. Two of these are the flexibility that it offers users and its overall effectiveness.

    PeerSpot user Ayman Y., an IT manager at NOMAC, notes all of the different backup options that Azure Backup offers. He writes, “It has many features. First of all, you can schedule a backup for the client as you like. You can do a backup from the whole virtual machine as an image. You can do a backup only from files and folders. It has every option. All options are available for the backup, for the restore, for the bandwidth utilization to do backups, even virtual machines or a physical machine. If you need to do a backup of the whole image from the virtual machine, all these options are there.”

    PeerSpot user Muzammil M., a senior operations engineer at the AlGosaibi Group, notes the effectiveness of Azure Backup when he writes, “Azure Backup is good because it is entirelycloud-based, which means that you can be 99.9% sure that your backup is safe. This is the reason that I suggest its use for companies that need to back up critical data.”

    Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, specializes in data protection and empowers customers to run a business by simplifying the protection, disaster recovery, and mobility of on-premises and cloud applications. Zerto uses advanced hybrid cloud IT technologies to recover and protect business-critical applications in on-premises and cloud environments, enabling them to deliver continuous service without compromising security. Zerto’s foundation is based on continual data protection (CDP) technology. Users can benefit from a single, unified, and automated recovery and data management experience across all virtualized or container-based workloads.

    Zerto's native clustering technology creates a resilient, fault-tolerant system that automates recovery of critical virtual machines while supporting software updates, new OS releases, and upgrades. With native clustering, a creation, migration, or deletion of a virtual machine is automatically replicated to all nodes in the cluster. This creates an automated failover and availability solution with the features of high-end dedicated servers running at a fraction of the cost.

    Zerto Features

    Zerto has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Continuous data security
      • Continuous replication
      • The industry's lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs
      • App and database protection and recovery on a granular level
    • Agility across hybrid and multi-cloud
      • Protection between clouds
      • Simple on-premises to cloud migration
      • User-friendly native cloud services
    • Simple to scale
      • Automation and orchestration are built-in
      • Cross-platform, multi-site analytics
      • Unified experience regardless of cloud
    • Software-based
      • Hardware, hypervisor, and cloud are all independent
      • No physical appliances
      • Future-proof

    Zerto Benefits

    • Robust disaster recovery: Continuous data protection enables recovery of entire clusters, multi-VM applications, or even a single server with the lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs. Zerto allows users to safeguard, manage, and recover all of their key digital assets, whether they’re recovering to a secondary location, the public cloud, or a managed service provider.
    • Constant backup: Instead of making backups every 12 or 24 hours, Zerto creates backups every 5-15 seconds. Zerto backup has no impact on production and eliminates the burden of micromanaging backup windows by using CDP instead of snapshots. Its backup provides immediate recovery of data, folders, or virtual machines (VMs) that are only seconds behind the original, which is a simple approach to completely avoid ransomware or erase inadvertent deletions.
    • Strong long-term retention: Send data to the cloud or a purpose-built storage appliance of your choice for months or years of retention. These long-term copies can be made from local backups or DR replicas, and they can be kept wherever is most convenient for your company. Its powerful indexing and search makes discovering and restoring data simple. For data you want to maintain but only use infrequently, use cost-effective cloud tiering to shift LTR copies from hot to cold to deep-freeze storage.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Zerto stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its disaster recovery abilities and its ease of use. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    Justin C., Director of IT at Arnott Inc. writes of the solution, “If we had to deal with a ransomware event, Zerto would be one of the first things I would use, because it is going to be the fastest to restore data to a certain point. If there were a fire in our building, Zerto would be a big thing too, because we would shut down everything that's in our building… It's definitely going to be one of our prevalent DRBC layers of protection."

    Brad W., Vice President of Information Technology at a financial services firm, notes, “The file restoration is very helpful. They've improved it over the years to make it a lot more user-friendly and easy to do, which I appreciate. So, we use that quite a bit. The failover process is quite simple and intuitive. Even the configuration and setup are pretty easy to do.”

    Sample Customers
    Russell Reynolds Associates, Somerset County Council, Kardem, PCL Construction
    United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company30%
    Manufacturing Company15%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Construction Company11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Insurance Company12%
    Healthcare Company10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business45%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise35%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise52%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise57%
    Buyer's Guide
    Azure Backup vs. Zerto
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Backup vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Azure Backup is ranked 7th in Backup and Recovery with 50 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Backup and Recovery with 234 reviews. Azure Backup is rated 7.8, while Zerto is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Azure Backup writes "Straightforward to set up and manage and allows us to monitor all backups in one place". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zerto writes "Gives us business continuity capabilities during hurricane season and in case of ransomware". Azure Backup is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Rubrik, Commvault Cloud, Acronis Cyber Protect and Veritas NetBackup, whereas Zerto is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware SRM, Rubrik, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines and Commvault Cloud. See our Azure Backup vs. Zerto report.

    See our list of best Backup and Recovery vendors.

    We monitor all Backup and Recovery reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.