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Bacula Enterprise vs Veritas Backup Exec 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)
Veritas Backup Exec
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
30th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
78
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 Veritas Backup Exec is 1.3%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Bacula Enterprise1.0%
Veritas Backup Exec1.3%
Other97.7%
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.
MuhammadNabeel - PeerSpot reviewer
Account Manager at Axelliant
Reliable backups have protected critical office data and support daily recovery needs
Veritas Backup Exec offers a range of features that cater to the needs of businesses looking for a comprehensive data protection solution. The advantages include ease of use, comprehensive coverage, automated recovery, scalability, integration, and technical support. Veritas Backup Exec especially helps our organization because it is designed to remedy complexity by delivering a simple backup and recovery solution that meets all protection needs with a host of powerful features that can help save time and money, increase reliability, and improve recovery time objectives.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Bacula is pretty stable."
"The most valuable features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."
"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."
"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."
"Bacula Enterprise, so far, has never let us down with their service and support."
"We have been using it for several years and we are very satisfied with how easy it is to configure and set up and run backups."
"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."
"I use this on a few of my servers, and it does a great job with scheduling full backups and incremental backups."
"One nice feature with Backup Exec is mainly that disaster can happen to any server and the disk image can be destroyed very easily. It's also easy to fully email the backup image and restore the server."
"The solution is stable."
"The beauty of the solution is that you can rely on it. It offers a quick recovery time when it's backing up items. The way it recovers data is excellent."
"This is a very flexible product, which allows you to back up not only the physical environment but also the cloud environment."
"All data sources are covered by a backup process which is very stable and fast, and a big advantage is that it can backup direct to tape."
"I have not seen another backup solution as scalable as this one."
"The solution is very fast. It does not take a long time to backup everything."
 

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."
"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."
"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."
"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."
"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."
"It is currently missing the dynamic backup feature for virtual machines, which is available in NetWorker. I can create politics in NetWorker to add virtual machines with specific tags, but I cannot do this in Backup Exec, which is a minus point for me. Currently, a user has to send a request to the Backup administrator to add a machine to the backup, but I should be able to create rules to automatically add a new machine to the backup. This kind of functionality is very important in current times, especially when we are using cloud solutions. I should be able to create more than one stream in a policy and specify how many streams I want to run in parallel in one policy. Currently, I have to manually create more policies to backup more than one virtual machine at the same time. Their support can also be improved in terms of response time."
"The one thing which could be improved, which we have informed Veritas about, is the ability to plug in to the cloud. Meaning, instead of using local storage if we're backing up a small user or end user, we want to be able to make it so they can direct the backups directly to the cloud. It can't be done at the moment. We can only back up to the storage then replicate to the cloud, but we cannot use the cloud as a source of storage."
"Doesn't include disaster recovery."
"Most features work when agents are installed on servers, but you have to pay extra for most of them."
"Sometimes permissions and deploying the agents can be tricky."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"The solution could improve by having better documentation."
"At the moment, we have a very complex environment. It would take some time to deploy an environment like ours from scratch."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."
"We have a perpetual license."
"Licensing depends on the part of the backup you're using. If you have SQL backup, then you must have a SQL license. If you have normal data backup, you would require a license for that."
"I rate the product's pricing a six out of ten."
"This product is priced for smaller customers."
"Veritas licensing is somewhat expensive. They have to decrease the price."
"I rate the price of Veritas Backup Exec a four out of five."
"We are satisfied with the price of this solution."
"The pricing can be improved."
"I would like to see a better licensing model. They changed it and it's just horrendous."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
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 Business36
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise29
 

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...
How do the backup solutions of Veeam and Veritas compare?
Technically, Veeam is best for hyper-v & VMWare replications, snapshots, HA failover, also support for file system backups inside VMs., support for tape library & FC too. But Veritas Netbac...
What needs improvement with Veritas Backup Exec?
While Backup Exec has dedicated user-based system administrators, IT professionals frequently point out several areas where the platform could be modernized and improved.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Backup Exec, Symantec Backup Exec
 

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.
Beta Offshore
Find out what your peers are saying about Bacula Enterprise vs. Veritas Backup Exec and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.