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BDRShield vs Bacula Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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

Bacula Enterprise
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
22nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Backup (18th)
BDRShield
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
20th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (12th), MSP Backup (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Bacula Enterprise is 1.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BDRShield is 1.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BDRShield1.0%
Bacula Enterprise1.1%
Other97.9%
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Davilson  Aguiar - PeerSpot reviewer
Analista Tecnologia Banco de Dados at Centro de Gestão da Tecnologia da Informação
Very cost-effective and well organized with good compression
It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company. A managerial user who wants more information beyond the operational technician should be able to access it. It could include greater transparency regarding the volume of data trafficked on the network, as well as the expectation of deduplication. A more practical strategy could come with a backup policy model as a suggestion for both large and small companies. A simple suggestion is to visually implement the backup time as far as your physical media.
Thomas Roes - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Switact
Ease of backup and restore improves data management with reliable support
The interface of BDRSuite Backup & Replication is pretty intuitive. Regarding their marketing strategy, I'm very bad at marketing. I always get a little edgy when people try to shove their product in my face. There are two sides to the story. If you don't know something exists, you might not even start to look for it unless you really know that you need it. If you are explicitly looking for a solution, then you'll find it. People that don't know that they should do backup don't have a place in IT. I rate BDRSuite Backup & Replication 8.5 out of 10.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is its ease of use; it works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."
"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."
"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."
"Technical support is excellent in my opinion."
"The most valuable features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."
"Bacula Enterprise, so far, has never let us down with their service and support."
"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."
"I am able to run Vembu on Windows NAS, which is beneficial. It does install on a Windows-based NAS. You can have the server running from the location where you are storing backups. You don't need a separate server for it in this case."
"It was very difficult to find a product that supports Red Hat Virtualization natively and to take a snapshot of the VM or a full backup or a dump from the machine. The option that Vembu proposed, to take the machine as an image, take it from the system, is also good."
"We invest in the backup so the continuity of the data is not affected."
"Their technical support is very good to work with, as they are able to propose alternate solutions to problems that work well for us."
"If we were to lose all of our data we wouldn't be able to operate, so it's very valuable for us."
"The scalability is good. It can scale. Adding a new server to a foreign location is easy."
"The way it improves our organization is that we haven't worried about looking at backups in about a year or so, it's just been running on its own."
"Their technical support is very good to work with, as they are able to propose alternate solutions to problems that work well for us."
 

Cons

"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."
"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."
"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."
"We are looking for a unique interface that can rule both enterprise and open source editions. Such a thing does not yet exist."
"We are looking for a unique interface that can rule both enterprise and open source editions. Such a thing does not yet exist."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."
"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"The system died twice and it was apparently the result of corrupted disk sectors. I tried to work with tech support to fix it, but they essentially gave up. So twice, I had to rebuild our server."
"The API uses a common data image to store the data for the sets, but unfortunately, it's limited to consecutive sets only. That's the only limitation I have observed so far."
"The only thing with room for improvement, as everybody says, since I'm in a home lab, would be the price for the CPU; the cost."
"Vembu BDR currently supports backups of O365, although it does not currently have an email archiving function to the O365 backups."
"The reporting can use some improvement."
"There are bugs. For one month, I encountered a big issue where my storage pool could not be identified. My backups were stopped because they were not able to locate the storage pool. So, I removed the settings and started the backups again. The application is not stable. It needs some debugging and testing on the build side of production."
"I run into the problem of their chat service not being available frequently."
"We had a lot of problems getting it configured in the first place. They also wanted us to allow them remote access to our machines without us watching what they're doing, which is a huge security risk for us. We said we couldn't do that, and they said they don't offer any phone support whatsoever."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."
"We have a perpetual license."
"The pricing structure is in line with other solutions. However, the option to replicate offsite to a unit at another office or at home is a big cost benefit. Instead of paying monthly for cloud storage, you replicate offsite for free."
"It is affordable. It has value with respect to the features included in the software."
"The product's pricing is of good value. It was much more affordable than the alternative solution to it, which was Veeam. That would be the closest competitor, and between those two, Vembu was much more affordable. It seemed reasonable for what we needed to do."
"The pricing is reasonable. I am okay with it."
"Take a look at the pricing and licensing closely. When we installed the BDR disaster recovery server, which is the duplication of the backup data on one server onto a second one where the backup data resides, it was not clear that this DR server needed two other licenses. These licenses were to back up the copy of the first backup server that had two licenses for the two physical host that it was backing up in the first place. Moving files around to a second DR server, why would I need an extra two licenses? I don't know if it's to make money, but it was not very obvious and I had to abort the project from there because I didn't plan to pay for extra licenses to copy data of the first two physical servers. I also didn't understand why it was needed. Hopefully, they will improve the explanation in the documentation for this."
"Previously, we used Veeam Backup, but we replaced it with Vembu. We switched because Vembu is more cost-effective. So, price was a factor."
"We chose this solution because it was cheaper and easier to use than Veeam and other solutions of this type."
"It has actually benefited my operation a fair bit. VMware requires a special hardware while Hyper-V runs on pretty much anything. It doesn't require any special hardware, so it saves a bit of money. Because Vembu does Hyper-V backup, there is no limit on how many VMs you can have. The newer version has a 100 VM limit on the single license, which has been greatly beneficial, because on one host a 100 VMs is a fair bit."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Educational Organization
15%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business44
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise10
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Bacula Enterprise?
Bacula is more expensive than various other solutions. It’s almost completely commercial now. Products like Veeam software are much more expensive.
What needs improvement with Bacula Enterprise?
Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability.
What is your primary use case for Bacula Enterprise?
The last scenario in which I used Bacula was for a customer who needed some open-source tool which could support encryption at that time. We managed to convince the customer to use Bacula to deploy...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BDRSuite?
BDRSuite is cost-effective because you can purchase a perpetual license that covers multiple environments. You only renew the support costs annually. It offers advanced features at roughly 75 perce...
What needs improvement with BDRSuite?
I really don't know what could be improved about BDRSuite Backup & Replication. I've never had anything that I thought would be nice if that was possible. Every time I thought that, it was alre...
What is your primary use case for BDRSuite?
BDRSuite Backup & Replication is used in my company and I recommend it to my customers.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Vembu BDRSuite, BDRSuite Backup & Replication
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NASA, SwissCom, Navisite, Turner Studios, Bank Austria, Caixa Bank, SdV Plurimedia, Leibniz University Hannover, Zeta Global, Tricore, NetLog, Siemens, LocaWeb, wbsGo, itesys, Queens School of Computing, Escrypt.
NASA, Intel, CISCO, PHILIPS, Atos, HEXAWARE, Motorola
Find out what your peers are saying about BDRShield vs. Bacula Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.