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BDRSuite Backup & Replication vs Bacula Enterprise 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

Bacula Enterprise
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
24th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Backup (17th)
BDRSuite Backup & Replication
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (7th), MSP Backup (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Bacula Enterprise is 1.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BDRSuite Backup & Replication 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

Davilson  Aguiar - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Redha Benlaksira - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to maintain multiple restore points is critical because it lets customers choose to restore their data to an hour or a day ago
BDRSuite is better than competing solutions because it can protect, back up, and recover data. A feature called live migration allows you to recover the same data in different environments. For example, I can back up the data from a VMware machine and restore it to a Hyper-V. You can also create repositories and back up environments to a cloud platform like GCP and AWS S3 buckets. BDRSuite allows you to back up virtual machines hosted on an EC3 instance or Microsoft 365 mailboxes, SharePoint, etc. The solution allows us to recover data instantly. We can recover all our data in under 15 minutes. In a virtual environment, we can recover a virtual machine and all its data in under 15 minutes. It's the same for a NAS, SAN, or DAS disk. The ability to boot instantly enables customers to maintain their business operations without interruption. BDRSuite's ability to maintain multiple restore points is critical because it gives customers the option to restore their data to an hour or a day ago. They can choose a full, incremental, or synthetic backup. Incremental backup makes sense if you are backing up the same data daily and you want to save space and network resources. It only backs up the differences or updates in every block. I've worked with lots of backup solutions, and BDRSuite is the easiest to use. It's simple to install and create backup jobs. It doesn't require many tasks to install the solution. You can easily back up and restore from one console

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Bacula is pretty stable."
"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."
"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."
"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."
"It works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."
"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."
"The most valuable features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."
"The most important feature, in terms of the hypervisor, is the ability to restore a virtual machine in a matter of minutes. We can take the backup of a virtual machine and we can restore it to the actual Vembu Backup server as a temporary solution, in a matter of minutes. We can just spin up a VM in no time; different hardware, even different processors. It's pretty dynamic in that sense."
"I get my backups done."
"We invest in the backup so the continuity of the data is not affected."
"The network solution is the most important feature, because we have our own backup server and are doing file backups for our customers."
"The compression, encryption, and deduplication features all work fine."
"I like the fact that BDRSuite can connect to VMware ESXi and automatically pull the virtual machines that I have in that environment. I also like that you can choose to back up the compute to the backup server or go straight to the cloud."
"The initial setup is easy and very nice."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to copy quickly. We have about 12 terabytes, and trying to copy that volume size through the file structure would take a week. BDRSuite has a different approach to copying and is much faster."
 

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."
"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."
"Bacula needs a graphical user interface because, for administrators, the command-line interface is okay, but for the average user it is not very easy."
"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"We are looking for a unique interface that can rule both enterprise and open source editions. Such a thing does not yet exist."
"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"The solution's UI and integrations could be better."
"For the more sophisticated backups that do not have a set backup process, procedures that are outside of the norm, it would be nice if we had more control and did not have to use their technical support. While they're very responsive and have always come through in a reasonable time frame, we would like to be able to manage everything on our own."
"They said they can support Red Hat Virtualization and we assumed that they support any compatible system but we found we need to do a network backup or a network image, which is not what it said on their website. I have had many discussions with them about where this component is. Initially, I was searching for a component which would back up Red Hat Virtualization. They said they support this in the same way they support Hyper-V and VMware. I haven't found the feature in their portal or in any of their software. They haven't made a special agent for it, in the way they did for Hyper-V."
"It would be a great improvement if they can give a console to control the systems. All other vendors let you simply log in to the cloud console and control everything from there, but for Vembu, whether you choose Vembu Cloud Backup or Vembu Disaster Recovery, you still need to install the Vembu software on your on-premise system and configure it from there. It would be great if I can get a cloud console to manage the systems."
"Vembu software runs on a Windows Server. The Windows Server has to be connected to the internet so it can connect with Vembu’s servers. It has to connect with Vembu. For some reason, if it doesn't connect, it stops working, and I don't know why on earth they do that. They require it to connect to the internet and connect with Vembu for it to continue to function. If the internet is down or if the server can't reach the internet, it stops working after a few days. That's not great because there are some people who want to do backups but they don't want to have their server accessible on the internet."
"The dashboard should more interactive."
"I have had issues where it was working and then it stopped and I had to diagnose what had changed or gone wrong to get it back up."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a perpetual license."
"This is an open-source solution."
"The pricing is reasonable. I am okay with it."
"When they changed to the newest version (4.1), they have more VMs allowed on the free version. Before, there were only three VMs allowed on the free version, and if you needed to back up more than three VMs, you had to get the paid version. Now, you can have up to 10 VMs on the free version."
"It's very affordable. We are very satisfied with the cost. It's very affordable for us."
"There is a drawback in the whole approach about how the licenses are managed. There are two consoles: cloud and on-premise. It seems that on a daily basis we have to manage both consoles, which isn't user-friendly. Ideally, it should be either a single on-premise console or only a cloud console. A single platform approach is the better solution. For now, with full licensing, you have to manage your instances on the Vembu Portal, then reassign licenses, and go back to your on-premise management console to do the real management. It is a bit awkward."
"BDRSuite, although cost-efficient, is more expensive than most other providers."
"One thing to note is that when you configure which virtual machine you're going to back up, if it's on one physical machine, they license it there. If it automatically fails over to a second machine, the license doesn't automatically move over with it. If they could make that a little more streamlined, that would be an improvement."
"For our needs, the price of the backup system is not too much... We checked out Veeam and Acronis but both were very expensive compared to Vembu."
"The pricing is pretty reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
88%
Retailer
3%
Educational Organization
2%
Financial Services Firm
1%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 do you like most about BDRSuite?
The best part of BDRSuite is how user-friendly it is and how it does not require any maintenance after the initial setup.
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 had a small problem integrating VMware and Hyper-V when customers used a free VMware license to create VMs. This is a problem because many customers use the free version of VMware. There are also...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Vembu BDRSuite
 

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 BDRSuite Backup & Replication vs. Bacula Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
852,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.