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Bacula Enterprise 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

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)
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 Bacula Enterprise is 1.0%, up from 0.5% 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

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.
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

"It works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."
"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."
"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."
"Bacula is pretty stable."
"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."
"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."
"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."
"The centralized GUI is the best feature, that there is only one webpage where we can see the states of all the backup jobs. We can see all the tasks that are running and we can quickly see if one fails; if they are running or have any issues. We have all that in one place."
"The backup process finishes very quickly."
"The support from NetApp is very good, and I would rate it as ten points."
"It's all together managing both storage and backup, which makes it easier for troubleshooting issues and the automation part of it"
"We have been very satisfied with the technical support's help. Their knowledge level is great. For a noncritical question, they will get back to us within a day."
"The way that it interconnects with VMware is really handy, because you can go right into your vSphere client, where you spend a lot of the day anyway, right-click on one of the VMs where you have backups running for however long, and you can restore either some files or restore the entire thing."
"The most valuable feature is that it's centralized. In the old SnapManager days, we had software for each server. Now, with a centralized system, we're able to manage all systems remotely, and all agents remotely, and update them remotely. That's a huge benefit for us."
"It's integrated with VMware vCenter. You can also see the backups there and you can do a restore completely out of vCenter."
 

Cons

"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"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."
"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."
"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."
"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."
"Since the solution's initial setup is complex, it should make training documents available in the public space."
"We would like to see more granular repording and reporting in bigger sets available in SnapCenter."
"I would like to see replication support between systems. Right now, it's kind of limited. We manage them separately from the storage system interface, not from SnapCenter. It would be nice if it was integrated into SnapCenter."
"The DBAs are comparing it to SMO but it doesn't have a lot of the functionalities that SMO has."
"One thing that might be improved is the ease of management."
"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."
"The product lags in terms of availability."
"The UI, the User Interface, needs to be improved. It's not as clean or modern as it could be."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."
"We have a perpetual license."
"The product is inexpensive."
"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."
"It's free. The license is included with other NetApp products."
"It comes free with the amount of equipment we purchase from NetApp. In terms of pricing, zero is my favorite number."
"We have a site license, so it comes with the product."
"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."
"Pricing is very good because if you already have NepApp controllers, then it's included."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
 

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 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

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.
All for One Steeb AG, Accenture
Find out what your peers are saying about Bacula Enterprise vs. NetApp SnapCenter and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,491 professionals have used our research since 2012.