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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
7.5
Number of Reviews
116
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 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 Veritas NetBackup is 3.5%, down from 5.3% 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

"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."
"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."
"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."
"The most valuable features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."
"It works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."
"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."
"Bacula is pretty stable."
"It is essential. We can't do without it."
"AIR and duplication, overall management and troubleshooting."
"The tool's information transfer and patching up is easy. The solution offers protection from ransomware which is also a valuable feature."
"The main features of this solution are deduplication, compression, ease of use, simplistic user interface, and compatibility with all the backup service systems."
"It is very easy to back up and recover files compared to other products."
"Veritas NetBackup Automatic Image Replication and CloudCatalyst features allow me to replicate deduped backup images from one site to a remote site, as well as duplicating deduped images to the Cloud (i.e. AWS S3, etc.)"
"The most valuable features are the VMware VADP backups and the support for data domains."
"It provides us with the versatility to back up everything we require which eliminates the need for a secondary backup solution."
 

Cons

"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."
"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."
"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."
"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."
"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."
"Veritas could simplify the firmware recovery in terms of the deployed. The process shouldn't be dependent on the agents. It should be completely agentless."
"DDBoost."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"I would like to have support enabled for cloud backups."
"I do not really like NetBackup as it is coming from a mix of other software packages."
"The web interface is not modern."
"The product must enable data migration from on-premise to the cloud."
"The restoration method and the compression ratio need improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."
"We have a perpetual license."
"Licensing was very expensive and did not scale well if needed to move between license models."
"If you want to have more scalability you have to purchase more licenses. The license is annually and there are a lot of different licensing depending on the number of terabytes needed. It is not based on per-user, core, or servers. You can backup anything you want using the purchased terabyte space."
"Annual licensing fee."
"We purchased a perpetual license and perform SMS renewals."
"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."
"We are happy with the pricing that we have, but it's expensive."
"The solution is expensive compared to other products."
"The licensing model is cost-prohibitive as you scale out."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
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 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: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.