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Bacula Enterprise vs Veritas NetBackup 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 (16th)
Veritas NetBackup
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
117
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Bacula Enterprise is 1.1%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Veritas NetBackup is 3.4%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

GiovanniRamirez - PeerSpot reviewer
Solid backup tool with good scalability
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 it in their environment It was a very good project. The Bacula concept, topology, and networking…
Wesam Qashou - PeerSpot reviewer
A mature backup solution, with many features, and great support
Veritas NetBackup is the first line of defense when disaster strikes. Before performing disaster recovery, we must have a good backup of our image that is also protected from ransomware. This way, we have a golden image that is resilient to ransomware attacks. We saw the benefits of Veritas NetBackup within the first three months.

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."
"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."
"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."
"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"Bacula is pretty stable."
"It works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."
"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."
"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."
"Best feature is its three-tier backup."
"I have found it to be the simplest solution to the market. It gives us a complete end to end solution. We are using this solution, Veritas Appliance and another one for access archiving. It is convenient to have all the support from one vendor."
"This is the best solution that I know of."
"The backup and restore features are helpful."
"It is essential. We can't do without it."
"It is important, when we chose a solution, that the customer service/technical support team could help us when we needed it, but the support was good."
"Veritas NetBackup is very stable and scales out very well."
"I think this is the best backup solution that we have. It is very good for the infrastructure."
 

Cons

"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."
"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."
"We are looking for a unique interface that can rule both enterprise and open source editions. Such a thing does not yet exist."
"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 speed of restoring data could be improved."
"GUI needs to be more user-friendly."
"It gets a lot of new features, but improvements in basic functionality are often sacrificed for a shiny new bullet point to put on sales presentations."
"We are looking forward to testing a feature that promises to allow us to host a workload directly from the backup appliance without rehydrating any items."
"The product is not able to keep up with other competitors in the market."
"System administrators would be more efficient in NetBackup if the number of tools and command lines was reduced."
"The biggest problem with NetBackup is licensing."
"NetBackup is expensive and should be cheaper. That is why we are moving on to another solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a perpetual license."
"This is an open-source solution."
"The price of NetBackup is okay. I think it's a little bit expensive but manageable. It has a lot of features, and the backup is better than most applications, so I think the price is competitive."
"The price of Veritas NetBackup is high, it should be reduced."
"Licensing was very expensive and did not scale well if needed to move between license models."
"The solution is expensive compared to other products."
"Veritas NetBackup is more expensive than Cohesity and Rubrik, but it is comparable in price to Commvault, IBM, and Dell."
"It was on a yearly basis. During the annual review, when we asked them about our licensing, they couldn't explain it. For example, we had reduced by a factor of 40%, but our license only dropped by 5%. We would then ask Veritas people if we've reduced this much and shut down these servers, why has our license changed so less? They were never able to give us a straight answer. They weren't able to say, "Well, you're using this, and this is more expensive." In many cases, as we reduced our capacity and what we were using with Veritas NetBackup, our licensing actually went up, and they were often unable to explain why."
"It is slightly more expensive than Commvault, but it is pretty much the same. It is an enterprise solution, so it scales quite well. It has a lot of features. So, you pay for what you get. It is not cheap, but it is fit for the purpose."
"There is a license required for this solution and it is priced based upon the data used."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
University
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
8%
 

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 the best next generation backup tool?
Assuming you have an onprem ecosystem which runs the VMware, physical systems on Win, Linux and Unix and run both traditional DB's and nosql DB's like mongo, then Netbackup (NBU) will be the right ...
What do you like most about Veritas NetBackup?
The most valuable feature of cloud integration is the ability to send data outside of your location. This can be achieved by integrating cloud tier options or other object storage solutions.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Veritas NetBackup?
The product is cost-effective, and I would rate its pricing as an eight out of ten. The pricing model is based on the amount of data transferred, making it manageable for us.
 

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 NetBackup and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.