Bacula Enterprise vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform comparison

Bacula Enterprise vs. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

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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 Cloud Backup

18th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Backup and Recovery (25th)

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...

Ranking in Cloud Backup

12th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

File System Software (2nd), NAS (9th), Cloud Migration (7th), Cloud Storage (10th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (8th), Cloud Storage Gateways (2nd), Content Collaboration Platforms (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud Backup category, the mindshare of Bacula Enterprise is 2.3%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Backup

Featured Reviews

Davilson Aguiar

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.

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Igal Muginstein

Engineering & Network Division Storage, Backup & Os Team Manager at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

Offers flexibility, fast performance, and ransomware protection

The platform is releasing new features at a fast pace, which sometimes leads to version updates every three to six months. Although updates are generally not complex, it is challenging to stop the production environment during these updates, even if the downtime is just a few minutes. This is a common challenge across all NAS providers. From my perspective, the most important area for improvement is developing a method to perform updates without affecting customer production environments. Additionally, there are some cache size limitations that might become problematic for future use cases, though they don’t impact current applications. Collaboration for NFS and SMB protocols could also be enhanced. Although this issue isn't specific to CTERA, it is something we are working on together to improve. The quality of the versions has improved, but occasional issues still arise. All solutions face this challenge, but we hope to see a continued reduction in the number of bugs. That said, we haven't had any major production problems in the last four years, and we appreciate how responsive CTERA is to our issues. We engage in brainstorming sessions together, and we value this relationship.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."

"The most valuable features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."

"It works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."

"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."

"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 brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."

"Bacula is pretty stable."

"The features I find most valuable are in the gateways themselves. They have done a great job over the years of providing insight into what is happening with our products, with the batches that come through that are scanned. I enjoy that part of it, and it is fairly easy to use from our standpoint once we get to know the product."

"It is a three-in-one solution for us. It is a file-sharing platform, an archiving solution, and also a backup solution."

"The solution provides substantial flexibility, allowing the separation of workloads across various hardware platforms without vendor lock-in. This flexibility makes it adaptable to future infrastructure changes."

"Our main reason for going for this solution was the uncontrollable growth of file data. It was unsustainable on our previous platform or technology. We needed something scalable like CTERA, so it was the scalability that we required."

"CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow."

"The solution provides data eviction, where unused data is evicted from the local file, freeing up space. It also allows data to be rehydrated from the cloud when needed."

"The support is awesome. It is top-notch. I would rate their support a ten out of ten."

"CTERA stood out due to its ease of use and superior security features."

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform pros

Cons

"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."

"The initial setup could be a bit easier."

"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."

"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."

"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."

"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."

"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."

"I am looking for a process where version upgrades do not impact the customers. There is no downtime."

"More monitoring from the platform would be good. There is some monitoring, but it is paid. It is a chargeable service. It would be good for that to be included in the base."

"Stability-wise, we just went through one issue that they addressed. We were having cloud sync issues."

"One suggested improvement for the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is the ability to distribute data across multiple active backend storage nodes rather than the current limitation of a single active node."

"It has a learning curve."

"It would help to have a global single-pane-of-glass view of all my CTERA devices. We have different regions, and we must log in to each portal to see what's happening with those. It would be nice to have a single portal to see the health of the devices, versions, and firmware upgrades. Sometimes, we want to dive into something more complex, like investigating why CTERA storage usage grew from 2 terabytes to 4 terabytes in a week. That's a little challenging. It's something we would like to see on the road map."

"However, in some cases, they could improve performance."

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."

"We have a perpetual license."

"It is fairly priced. I am not too involved in the pricing of what we used to pay, but it would have reduced the cost of ownership. I cannot give a figure, but the EMC solution was very expensive compared to CTERA."

"I find the pricing reasonable. They offered us deals that helped us. Especially with the upgrade to a bigger unit last year, they were helpful with the deal."

"So far, pricing seems to be fine."

"CTERA's pricing seems to be on par with some of the other players, such as Nasuni and Azure. They all have benefits, but CTERA is competitive for its features."

"I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards."

"It is hard to compare the costs if we want to retain the same model of a separate high-performance storage or certain things, but it is one of the cheapest solutions available in Israel."

"CTERA's pricing model is competitive compared to other companies that achieve the same thing. Their closest rival is Nasuni, and CTERA is significantly more affordable than Nasuni."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

20%

University

10%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

70%

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

University

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards.

What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

One area for improvement is the migration tool, which at times does not work as designed, necessitating the use of alternative solutions like Robocopy. AI and automation features could enhance the ...

What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

We use it as a hosted cloud solution. We had initially tried Azure File Sync, but that did not work. Due to certain security concerns, I was tasked with researching alternatives. I evaluated severa...

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Product Reports

Backup and Recovery

Download Bacula Enterprise product report

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Download CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform product report

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform report

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Bacula Systems

CTERA

Overview

Bacula Enterprise is a highly scalable, especially robust and secure data backup and recovery software. Its unique low cost subscription model empowers data centers to truly escape data volume price traps. With a high degree of flexibility and customizability, Bacula offers native integration with a wide range of hypervisors, databases, file systems, cloud interfaces and containers. High numbers of enterprise organizations worldwide (incl. NASA, Bank of Austria, Swisscom or Sky PLC) have adopted Bacula Enterprise backup software in mission critical environments because of its advanced features and ability to handle high data volume at very low cost.

Bacula Systems

The CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform provides a cloud-native global file system over public and private object storage, revolutionizing the world of hybrid cloud data solutions. Enhanced by a rich data services ecosystem, CTERA enables enterprises to gain full control of their data for optimal edge performance, data insight, and governance. The platform focuses on security, providing features like data encryption, access controls, and ransomware protection. Centralized management tools enable efficient data control and monitoring. The platform is being used to replace legacy NAS and file servers, especially at remote locations, and simplify backup and disaster recovery of file data while providing the flexibility of multi-cloud deployments with infinite scalability. CTERA is at the core of hybrid cloud transformations of some of the world’s largest banks, healthcare organizations, global media groups, and government agencies, in deployments that scale to tens of petabytes.

CTERA

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.

McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI

Bacula Enterprise vs. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform