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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
28th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Backup (19th)
NetApp SnapCenter
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
40th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Bacula Enterprise is 1.0%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp SnapCenter is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Bacula Enterprise1.0%
NetApp SnapCenter0.8%
Other98.2%
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.
SaneeshC - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. engineer at Sify Technologies
Has reduced backup time for large workloads and supports smooth workload migration
Role-based access control and multi-factor authentication are security features available in NetApp SnapCenter. The one-time password comes to our multi-factor authentication tool; we work with Cisco Duo, and that OTP is generated through that tool, which we use to access the device. There are different options through which we can migrate workloads without downtime. The user interface is very easy to handle and not complicated. There are multiple features that make NetApp SnapCenter valuable. In case of any job failure, we get an alert over email. For jobs replicating from site A to site B, we know how long it will take to complete that replication. All that information is available in the console, and there aren't any difficulties or objections that need to be improved.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."
"The solution has had a tremendous impact on our public company, as we are now cost-effective and even better on performance with our restorations."
"The support is outstanding and world-class."
"The most valuable feature is the support for Linux servers."
"Technical support is excellent in my opinion."
"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."
"Bacula Enterprise, so far, has never let us down with their service and support."
"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."
"The support from NetApp is very good, and I would rate it as ten points."
"It allows us to easily take a Snapshot and use it with any backup tools. We can also take Snapshots on the application side. We can also take Snapshots on the application side. If we want to restore an SAP or an Oracle machine, a normal Snapshot won't do it, but we can do so with SnapCenter."
"The reporting feature has been particularly beneficial to upper management... When you do manual backups, you do not get the benefit of seeing successes and failures and how often you have to do restores. With SnapCenter, you get all of that."
"Being able to add everything in as resource groups is a valuable feature... Having all the SQL servers put into specific buckets, based on their year of release - 2008, 2012, 2014 - allows us to get almost immediate backups that are easily seen and reported on."
"The most valuable feature is the RBAC, the Role-Based Access Control. In our managed service, we can have different layers of security."
"The stability seems good."
"The product’s most valuable feature is cloning."
"We have found that the snapshotting mechanism is better than VMware."
 

Cons

"Relying solely on a desktop is a bit frustrating as its GUI isn't exactly responsive."
"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."
"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."
"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."
"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"The product lags in terms of availability."
"There is one area that needs improvement and that's in the alerting. When you set up your SMTP alerts, it only has - and I don't understand why - the ability to send an anonymous SMTP. It doesn't do basic authentication, which frustrated me for a while until I figured out that I'm not missing something. It's just not there."
"The documentation could be a little bit better so that we could handle more of the troubleshooting ourselves, rather than having to go through support."
"I feel a little bit that during the whole process of putting this software into production we were like a beta program. It was full of bugs... For example, we had a problem with truncating our Exchange log files... It has improved over time."
"I'm waiting for SnapCenter for hybrid solutions. Right now, we only have SnapManager for hybrid. I need agents for that. People are looking to install SnapCenter in a SQL environment, but where they're running SQL on Hyper-V and using virtual files. Currently, we don't have support for hybrid."
"The GUI is still so-so. I' don't use the GUI that often anymore because it's really slow, refreshing disks, refreshing hosts, and you have to click a lot."
"For us, it's a pain and a waste of time because NetApp wants us to be highly certified."
"Since the solution's initial setup is complex, it should make training documents available in the public space."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a perpetual license."
"This is an open-source solution."
"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."
"We see a financial value with SnapCenter because we don't have to license Commvault, which is pretty expensive."
"The license for SnapCenter was included with the storage array."
"We have a site license, so it comes with the product."
"It comes free with the amount of equipment we purchase from NetApp. In terms of pricing, zero is my favorite number."
"Pricing is very good because if you already have NepApp controllers, then it's included."
"It's free. The license is included with other NetApp products."
"The product is inexpensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
7%
 

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 Business8
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise12
 

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 NetApp SnapCenter?
The product team handles the commercial aspects of pricing.
What needs improvement with NetApp SnapCenter?
We have not started much with the automation capability in NetApp SnapCenter. Regarding the integration aspect, I am not certain about its complexity, as this was built by the OEM NetApp team.
What is your primary use case for NetApp SnapCenter?
The major use case for NetApp SnapCenter is that our customer previously used Commvault. For huge VMs with sizes of five TB or 10 TB, taking the file level backup in Commvault took a long time, oft...
 

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: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.