Cohesity DataProtect vs Dell NetWorker vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

Cohesity and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the Backup and Recovery category. Cohesity is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.3, while Dell Technologies is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.0. Cohesity holds a 3.4% mindshare in BRS, compared to Dell Technologies’s 3.1% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Cohesity users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

Cohesity DataProtect

Read 73 Cohesity DataProtect reviews

9,187 Views
5,666 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Dell NetWorker

Read 84 Dell NetWorker reviews

5,010 Views
4,203 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Protect

Read 149 IBM Spectrum Protect reviews

4,073 Views
3,133 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Cohesity DataProtect

Dell NetWorker

IBM Spectrum Protect

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cohesity DataProtect, Dell NetWorker, and IBM Spectrum Protect based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Veeam Software, Zerto, Commvault and others in Backup and Recovery.

To learn more, read our detailed Backup and Recovery Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Backup and Recovery

April 2025

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Helped 849,686 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Cohesity DataProtect is 3.4%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell NetWorker is 3.1%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

Giovanni Golinelli.

Hybrid IT Architect at Quanture Spa

Easy to use, offers good scalability and responsive support

The deployment depends on the environment. Deploying on VMs is relatively simple. But for most of our customers, we implement physical clusters with at least three configured hosts using the existing model. So, it depends on the setup. Implementing DataProtect itself wasn't particularly challenging. One key requirement for successful DataProtect deployment is proper network configuration. If the network setup isn't right, you won't achieve optimal performance. We have developed a service for some of our customers where they implement an appliance or physical cluster of Cohesity at the customer site. Then, we use cloud clustering to replicate, and even in production, a second copy of the protected data. And in some cases, we have developed some disaster recovery procedures using Cohesity.

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ErmiasGirma

System and Cloud Deployment Engineer at Safaricom Ethiopia plc

Offers seamless integration and cost-saving benefits with enhanced recovery capabilities

Currently, in my organization, I am using Dell NetWorker for open-source solutions like PostgreSQL and MySQL databases, and some large VM environments. It also supports the Dell library and is used for the library archiving system Dell NetWorker allows for extensive customization, supporting…

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Syed Habib

Head of Infrastructure Security (S.A.V.P) at EXIM Bank Ltd

Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking

It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"A robust, verifiable backup with a restore solution, which decreases our backup and has a restore window."

"The four independent node cluster architecture is redundant. It maintains data integrity and load balancing."

"The most valuable features of Cohesity DataProtect are SpanFS and the handling of hybrid workloads."

"The support is awesome. They are very fast, competent and friendly."

"The enterprise search and instant restore are pretty valuable. Also, the Helios stuff is pretty good and the SAS engine for ransom malware detection."

"With the ability to stage an entire lifecycle through versioning, integrated with AWS, it has made it possible to protect our corporation from end to end."

"The most valuable features are the rapid VM restores and the ability to quickly find files and download them directly to my desktop so that I can put them where I need them to be."

"We like that we can use production data to run intensive reports that would otherwise bog down the production server."

More Cohesity DataProtect pros

"It is an extremely stable product."

"When it was required that data had to be restored for our customer, it was accomplished successfully and this has kept our end users satisfied."

"Technical support for this solution is very good."

"The best feature of Dell EMC NetWorker is its wide spectrum of available plugins for each and every software that you can back up, such as SAP HANA, Oracle, AXI-based machines, or Dell-based machines. Whatever you want to back up, you can do it with Dell EMC NetWorker. It is a very solid backup software. It is the oldest backup software from EMC, and it comes from Dell EMC's legacy."

"Deduplication is the most valuable feature of this solution."

"This solution is very stable."

"It is the best umbrella, serving the best applications."

"The interface is user-friendly and can be used by the end-users."

More Dell NetWorker pros

"It helps our customers protect their data, keep it long-term, and feel pretty secure about it, basically sleeping well at night."

"Scalability, performance, mass platform coverage. It's one of the few backup products on the market right now which an organization can bring in and it will serve all of their backup needs. It's a completely centralized solution."

"They have recently added support tickets specifically engineered around performance. This has been very useful for us when we run into issues where customers are looking to try to squeeze a lot more horsepower out of older system."

"With data deduplication and compression, we are reducing our overall storage footprint for our disk histories. Therefore, we are reducing the actual cost of the disk for our data protection and data backups."

"Instead of taking three different backups of your systems, you're taking only one. You're able to crack that open and get what you need. The incident recovery, where it creates the VM and then you're running it, technically you're running it on Spectrum Protect. But then in the background, it's doing the storage motion and moving it off the Spectrum Protect back to your VMware environment. The users don't know the difference."

"I have found that the most valuable feature is useful documentation and troubleshooting."

"The main feature of this product is a flexible architecture and functionality that allows you to solve problems of any complexity and scale. Most importantly, it is not just a product that simply makes a backup, but it restores and saves a large number of services in critical situations. By the way, it works fine with different types of clouds, supports S3."

"We've found the product to be quite stable and the performance is very good."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pros

Cons

"We are waiting on the AIX agent to be released."

"Non-cloud services need improvement."

"The rack mounting instructions did not appear to be correct, but we were able to overcome it."

"Quality testing of upgrades should be somewhat improved."

"The one area where we would like to see additional improvements is with reporting. There are very granular reports from each grid. There are also some built-in reports within Helios (SAS Management Console) that offers basic reporting. However, for complex, large-enterprise environments, a more robust reporting engine that supports detailed audit reporting and enhanced ad hoc reports would be welcome."

"Many of the reports are basic, at most, and at times we had to open a support ticket to help find or develop a report for our needs."

"When a new release is launched, there may be some bugs that need to be addressed by the developers. However, they promptly resolve these issues, and the software runs smoothly once again."

"It would be great to add SQL Object Level restore, so user objects, tables, etc. can be restored without having to restore the entire DB."

More Cohesity DataProtect cons

"It's complex in nature."

"There are too many reboots and the software requires constant updating."

"Since the product is not on the front banner of Dell, the support may not be the best."

"Currently, the NetWorker server only supports the Windows server bare-metal recovery, so an improvement would be built-in support for Linux and UNIX BMR."

"NetWorker's major problem is its legacy software."

"There should be more vendors incorporated into the solution."

"It could be more user-friendly."

"The price could be cheaper."

More Dell NetWorker cons

"We have had some problems about using storage agents on the X6 environment. It is not quite stable, but it is also not supported in a virtualized environment."

"The usability of IBM Spectrum Protect could be improved, specifically additional features to the product in the operations center. Additional reporting facilities and stronger reporting tools such as build dashboards would be beneficial."

"The solution's initial setup process wasn't easy...The solution is overly complicated in terms of architecture, especially compared to other tools in the market."

"The product should be improved to save more space."

"We would like to see capabilities of long-term archiving and more support for hardware platforms."

"It is not easy to manage like other products in the market. It is okay only if you are command-line driven. Even though the operation center is there, it doesn't provide a single view of everything. You have to, for example, use TSMManager on top of it, which gives you a far better management capability, but it is a third-party product. Its management needs to be improved. There should be an HTML or graphical interface. It is a very difficult product. For example, you have a backup policy where you want a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly policy standard. It is an old kind of system where you have to keep retention for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups, which is very difficult in IBM Spectrum Protect. In other products, in a matter of five minutes, you can configure such a policy. In TSM, it takes you one, two, or three days because you need to configure a node for each of them. If you have 250 nodes, you have to configure each node for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly retention. If you have 1,000 nodes, it is going to take you ages just to configure and register the nodes. You need to configure the schedule and the CAD daemons or services, depending on whether it is a Unix or Windows OS. Unfortunately, it is a very long and drawn-out process. You have to stop and start the services for changes to take effect. This is a very difficult part of TSM in IBM Spectrum Protect. To configure a backup policy, I should be able to select the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly options in one screen and finish it. After that, everything should happen in the background. All the backup products in the market already do that, and they are very simple to manage. This particular part of this solution has really been a major pain area for us, and unfortunately, we could not find a workaround. There is nobody at IBM who can give us a way to configure all this easily through a GUI or even scripts."

"Its price can be better. It is very expensive. Its interface is very old and not user friendly. They can improve its interface. Their support can also be better. My clients are not very satisfied with the support because they are not really quick."

"This solution is not mature in terms of disaster recovery and could be improved."

More IBM Spectrum Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Sizing is important and it is easy to overestimate."

"Cohesity came in at the best price."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."

"Ensure that you understand the per TB licensing model. Also, Exchange backups are not native to Cohesity and require Kroll."

"The tool's licensing costs are yearly. It is cheaper than other backup solutions."

"We purchased support from Cohesity to ensure that should we face an issue, we don't have to deal with different service providers."

"The tool's pricing is average."

"Pricing, setup costs, etc. are pretty typical. The initial cost for Cohesity was less than other products the we evaluated. Cohesity's pricing does offer benefits as DR target costs are less than other solutions. You are not charged for DataProtect licensing for target DR data consumption."

More Cohesity DataProtect pricing and cost advice

"The price of the license could be cheaper and it would be a benefit if they came up with a new pricing model. The competitors here in Oman sell universal licensing where a number of virtual machines are hosted at the customer place which can be licensed, or you can license the CPU sockets in those servers. However, NetWorker offers only CPU sockets or overall storage capacity to backup, but there is no universal licensing where you can provide a number of VMs. They should offer more options to stay competitive with other solutions, such as Veeam."

"The price is a little on the high side, but it's reliable and provides a good service."

"Dell NetWorker has two types of licensing models."

"The solution follows a subscription model for licensing. We pay annually to use the solution and the price is high."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."

"Licensing is based on the number of terabytes, so you need to purchase packages."

"Dell NetWorker is an expensive solution. None of the backup products are cheap. The licensing model offered is usually a five-year one."

"It is not very expensive and not very cheap."

More Dell NetWorker pricing and cost advice

"Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less."

"IBM provides an open license policy, which is more like a gentlemen's agreement."

"IBM Spectrum Protect can be considered an averagely-priced product."

"We are paying for support and maintenance on a monthly basis."

"Licensing IBM Spectrum Protect can be somewhat confusing for new users due to the options available, such as licensing on a capacity or per server basis."

"The pricing is a little expensive for our current employer, so they want to move to a cheaper solution."

"The pricing model of this solution is another difficult area, it's very sophisticated in the way they charge. It's based on PBU, which is a type of processor, how, many processors, and you need to put everything into an equation. However, they have different ways of charging or licensing. One way is a back-end volume or front-end volume, which is quite complicated."

"We pay for a terabyte license to support our backend usage."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

40%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cohesity DataProtect?

Several features enable us to perform fast recovery, such as instant fast recovery. All our virtual machines protecte...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cohesity DataProtect?

Typically on-premises nodes/clusters are deployed for primary backup (to enable instant mass restore) so price will b...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cohesity DataProtect?

While there are improvements to be made, such as providing support for older systems like IBM iSeries and tandem syst...

See all answers

What's the difference between Dell EMC Avamar and Dell EMC NetWorker?

From the very beginning, Dell EMC NetWorker considers users and those who might potentially become users. In terms of...

See all answers

What do you like most about Dell NetWorker?

The feature that offers the greatest benefits in ensuring data integrity is its backup capability.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell NetWorker?

The licensing cost is somewhat expensive. While we use a traditional license, there is a capacity-based license avail...

See all answers

What do you like most about IBM Spectrum Protect?

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Protect?

It's expensive. I acknowledge the cost associated with it.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?

It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible w...

See all answers

Comparisons

Rubrik vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 27% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 15% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 6% of the time

Zerto vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 2% of the time

More Cohesity DataProtect Competitors

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs Dell NetWorker

Compared 31% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Dell NetWorker

Compared 13% of the time

Dell Avamar vs Dell NetWorker

Compared 11% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Dell NetWorker

Compared 8% of the time

Oracle Data Guard vs Dell NetWorker

Compared 2% of the time

More Dell NetWorker Competitors

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 18% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 18% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 10% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 10% of the time

Nutanix Mine Integrated Backup vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cohesity DataProtect

April 2025

Download Cohesity DataProtect product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell NetWorker

April 2025

Download Dell NetWorker product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Protect

April 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Protect product report

Also Known As

Cohesity

NetWorker

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Overview

What is Cohesity DataProtect?

Cohesity DataProtect is a top-level, sophisticated, software-defined backup and recovery solution created for cloud environments. Cohesity DataProtect is made to hyperscale and is one the most thorough policy-based protection solutions available on the market today.

Cohesity DataProtect melds multiple-point products into a single software that is able to be deployed as on-premise or consumed as a service.

Top Features:

Hyperscale made easy: Cohesity DataProtect improves data protection by doing away with the need for backup silos and administers backup and recovery with a single user-friendly, easy-to-understand interface. Cohesity DataProtect provides extensive 24/7 enterprise-class protection for a large, varying set of sources, including virtual and physical servers, NAS and SaaS workloads, relational and distributed databases, and traditional and containerized applications.

Super fast recovery: Cohesity DataProtect offers near-zero recovery point objectives (RPOs) and near-instant recovery time objectives (RTOs) to satisfy your business service-level agreements (SLAs). Using Cohesity Helios’ unified data plane and control plane you can immediately search and recover data on any Cohesity cluster, located anywhere. DataProtect distinctively minimizes downtime by immediately mass restoring any amount of virtual machines (VMs) to any point in time, and lowers data protection costs by as much as 70% or more.

Backup as a Service: Feel free to take advantage of the elasticity of the public cloud and the cost-effective value of Cohesity DataProtect when delivered as a service. When you choose an OPEX option, you can eliminate the need for on-premises hardware. There is a SaaS option that will allow you to very simply configure your backup workloads and immediately begin protecting your vital all-important data and applications.

It’s as easy as: sign-up, connect, and protect!

Ransomware protection: Cohesity DataProtect offers stellar recovery at scale. The solution is so intuitive, it has machine learning-based anomaly detection to stop incidents before they happen. Cohesity DataProtection can provide immutable backups, Datalock write once, read many (WORM), encryption, and role-based access control (RBAC).

Cohesity DataProtect integrates well with many of today’s top solutions, including, but not limited to:

Hypervisors: VMware vSphere (5.5 and later), Microsoft Hyper-V (2019, 2016, 2012 R2), Nutanix AHV and RHeV

Kubernetes-based data and application state

Cloud: AWS EC2, Amazon RDS, Azure VM, and Google Compute

Physical: Windows, Linux(RHEL, CentOS, OEL, Debian, Ubuntu), AIX (7.x), and Solaris

Databases: Oracle (11g R2, 12c), Oracle RAC and SQL (2008 or later)

Distributed Databases (NoSQL and Hadoop): MongoDB, CouchbaseDB, Apache, Cassandra, Cloudera, and Hortonworks.

Bare Machine Recovery: Windows and Linux

Applications: MS Exchange (2010 SP3 or later), MSFT Active Directory, Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, Groups), SalesForce (SFDC), and SAP HANA

Primary storage: Pure FlashArray, HPE Nimble, and Cisco Hyperflex

NAS: Pure FlashBlade, NetApp, Isilon, IBM GPFS, Google EFS, Elastifile, and generic solutions*

Reviews from Real Users

One reviewer, who is head of IT infrastructure at Kampmann says, “Cohesity really is a Next-Gen Data Management Software,” and goes on to indicate that Cohesity “works flawlessly with easy replication of backups and numerous supported backup sources.”

Another user, who is a senior network engineer at a legal firm, relates that "Cohesity is a robust and feature-rich solution"

Cohesity

Built on a reputation of efficiency and reliability, thousands of customers trust Dell NetWorker to protect their data and applications across multiple environments, from core to edge to cloud.

Inherently flexible, NetWorker helps you deploy and leverage the data protection that fits your needs. NetWorker protects both physical and virtual environments, including VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as cloud workloads on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

NetWorker is available as part of Dell Data Protection Suite, which offers comprehensive data protection software applications and tools. NetWorker is delivered as software and as a virtual edition.

Dell Technologies

IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) family. It enables reliable, cost effective backups and fast recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.

IBM

Sample Customers

Tribune Media

Republic Bank, Westgate Resorts, Macquire Cloud Services, Shriners, Panatonni, Qatar Islamic Bank, Eurosport

CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology

Find out what your peers are saying about Veeam Software, Zerto, Commvault and others in Backup and Recovery. Updated: April 2025.

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