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Bacula Enterprise vs Unitrends 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)
Unitrends
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
29th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
35
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 Unitrends is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Bacula Enterprise1.0%
Unitrends0.7%
Other98.3%
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.
Derek Schneider - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Information Technology at a hospitality company with 201-500 employees
Daily recovery tests have validated restore readiness and ensured consistent data protection
The best features of Unitrends include the daily reporting functionality. When backups fail, it is obvious in the logs what caused the issue. Most times it is a credential problem, which is relatively easy to resolve. Though I have experienced a few more challenging issues, nothing has affected critical backup restore functionality. Every time I have needed to restore something, it has worked successfully. The support team is readily available when I need assistance, and they help walk me through issues, solving them within a reasonable timeframe. The automated backup scheduling feature has helped our organization in managing backup timelines and consistency by handling all the work automatically. We set the schedule, breaking things into smaller chunks since our main common area for files is large. I have staggered the backups so some areas receive more attention than others, particularly for less active data. Adding, removing, excluding, and inputting elements is straightforward. The system makes it simple to schedule portions and generate reports on their functionality. The impact of Unitrends' instant recovery features on strengthening data security measures is significant. I generally use instant recovery when restoring specific files or instances where we need data that has changed. The process involves loading the backup, selecting the desired version, waiting for it to unpack, and retrieving the file. Every restore attempt has been successful. I run instant recovery daily in test mode on two virtual machines. I use it to test my domain controller and file server to ensure they communicate properly in the test environment. This ensures that in case of failure, I can activate the recovery and restore server functionality.

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 features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."
"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."
"Technical support is excellent in my opinion."
"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."
"The support is outstanding and world-class."
"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."
"Bacula is pretty stable."
"It works as expected the vast majority of the time, which is an improvement over other products that seem to break with the slightest change in the environment."
"Unitrends changed my backup window to half the time spent before and the space used too, the de-duplication is very high"
"Being an appliance-based solution, we were able to migrate backup solutions without having to purchase a lot of hardware separately."
"The ability to backup both physical and virtual machines, along with having an appliance store the backups locally instead of on a file server, NAS, or SAN."
"When I have had to use tech support, they've been very good."
"If you are a large organization, this is a product for you."
"Overall I really like the solution."
"They have great support."
 

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."
"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."
"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 interface needs to be easier for adding new devices to be managed."
"Relying solely on a desktop is a bit frustrating as its GUI isn't exactly responsive."
"No appliance update notifications."
"We had an issue about a year ago, but it actually ended up wiping our entire backup history, because one of the databases got corrupted, and we couldn't recover the backup data."
"The only area that I would say needs some improvements is the initial setup."
"If the interface could be less complex, it would be great. It's not the easiest to get around and to work with."
"Though this is kinda hard to come up with at this point, but I think instead of deploying the VBAs from vCenter, it would be really nice if only the first deployment is needed from vCenter and the rest could be handled from within the solutions portal."
"Technical support has not been very helpful when there are complex issues. It is sometimes difficult to find someone who can answer questions the right way."
"Support is great for small simple issues, but anything more difficult, it is hard to get good resolutions without having to badger them and their management."
"Comparing the features and the working pattern, definitely they have to come down on pricing if they want to compete in the market."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."
"We have a perpetual license."
"Unitrends is an expensive solution."
"No comment."
"With respect to cost, my advice is to get what you need."
"When we renew the Unitrends maintenance contract and update it to the latest version, the cost would be $5,000 per year. There are no hidden costs. They've been transparent with the costs."
"Based on a scale of one to ten, with one being low and ten being high, I would rate the pricing of this solution as a three. Also, there are no additional costs involved in the standard licensing of the solution."
"I would rate the solution's pricing a four out of ten. The licensing is yearly and it depends on the customers."
"Pricing model constantly changes."
"You should be aware how much the monthly costs are to use, what the initial costs for hardware are, and what the options to expand are, if needed."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
8%
Construction Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Retailer
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

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 Business12
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise8
 

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 needs improvement with Unitrends?
I would evaluate the impact of Unitrends' ransomware detection for strengthening our data security measures as somewhat misleading. The ransomware detection from the appliance incorrectly identifie...
What is your primary use case for Unitrends?
Our main use case for Unitrends is taking our on-premise virtual machines or bulk data store and backing it up on a daily basis, or more frequently depending on requirements, and testing the virtua...
What advice do you have for others considering Unitrends?
Regarding Unitrends' integration with leading cloud services, I utilize Spanning, which handles Microsoft 365 environment backup for a location without direct file server access. Their SharePoint d...
 

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.
NHL Players Association, Salvation Army, Sligro Food Group, Mason General Hospital, Tec Group, Saldab IT, Baker Tilly, Clinton Savings Bank, Ennit Magna Bank, Manukau Institute of Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about Bacula Enterprise vs. Unitrends and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,153 professionals have used our research since 2012.