CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs Cohesity SpanFS comparison

Cohesity and CTERA are both solutions in the File System Software category. Cohesity is ranked #10, while CTERA is ranked #2 with an average rating of 9.2. Cohesity holds a 4.4% mindshare in FSS, compared to CTERA’s 10.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of CTERA users are willing to recommend the solution.

Cohesity SpanFS

Read 2 Cohesity SpanFS reviews

301 Views
301 Comparison Views

0% willing to recommend

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...

Read 10 CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform reviews

2,170 Views
803 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cohesity SpanFS

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cohesity SpanFS and CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two File System Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Cohesity SpanFS Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Cohesity SpanFS

September 2025

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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

Cohesity SpanFS

Ranking in File System Software

10th

Average Rating

10.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...

Ranking in File System Software

2nd

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

NAS (4th), Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Storage (4th), Cloud Backup (7th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (6th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st), Content Collaboration Platforms (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of Cohesity SpanFS is 4.4%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 10.8%, up from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

File System Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform	10.8%
Cohesity SpanFS	4.4%
Other	84.8%

File System Software

Featured Reviews

Stefan-Motsch

Evangelist / CTO at fgnext

Along with offering competitive prices, the solution can be used by small, medium, and large businesses

While guaranteeing the strictness of the file system, there is a lot of performance involved. The performance is not as good as I expected. It's not the functionality here but the performance level. It won't be a problem if it's twice as fast. Even though its stability has room for improvement, I would recommend it to my bigger customers. The only problem is the current performance of the individual nodes. As a sale-out solution with integrated load-balancing functions, performance is in principle not a problem at all. Capacity and performance are linearly scalable over the number of nodes in the cluster. An increase in the performance of the individual nodes in future releases would be desirable.

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Richard Saini

Lead Infrastructure Architect at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

The ransomware recoverability has helped with our data protection mandates

File replication and versioning seem to work very well. We did have some challenges at the beginning, but all of that has been resolved now. It works very well. It does what our users require. Replication is excellent. We needed that, and the versioning is also pretty important. One of the reasons we chose CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform was the requirements we had to have ransomware protection. Our existing solution at the time would not have met those requirements of being able to restore from a ransomware incident. What we wanted from a platform was the ability to restore a snapshot or restore a file system or data back to a previous point in time, and CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform offered us that. Availability was a very key feature of why we liked the solution. It is effectively like the disaster recovery feature, and that also lends itself to replication. It works very well for our ransomware recovery objectives. There is business growth due to being able to offer greater storage capacity for them. Before, we were running into storage limitations, and now that we have enabled CTERA, we can accommodate more data and users. When it comes to reduction in recovery time objectives, we have not used it in that way. However, we are anticipating that our recovery time objectives will come down from over a month to hours or days. Recovery point objectives will also effectively be down to hours. It is hard to say how much it has freed up IT resources for other projects or tasks. Now that it is fully implemented and fully working, we are spending a lot less time looking after it. It has drastically reduced the amount of time we used to spend on backups. It is hard to provide the metrics, but six hours a month or something like that would be fair. The ransomware recoverability feature has definitely helped with our data protection mandates. It has reassured our security teams that we are in a good place with regard to securing the data and being able to recover the data.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"It has snapshot capabilities. We take advantage of those."

"It is a three-in-one solution for us. It is a file-sharing platform, an archiving solution, and also a backup solution."

"CTERA has out-of-the-box data protection capabilities."

"CTERA has been particularly capable of keeping all of our workstations backed up. That became a critical feature for us during the pandemic when computers were rarely in the office. Everybody went off-site with their computers, and we were accustomed to working with a centralized storage infrastructure where people would come to the office and connect to the server to use, create, and modify files. Everything was done directly to that server."

"CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow."

"I like that the glass is always half full with CTERA file services. It keeps the data hot for users on location and then tiers off older data. If you need it, the stub is still there. You can click on it, and it's back on the device."

"CTERA's instantaneous and redundant file replication, available across multiple geographical locations, ensures easy and user-friendly recovery."

"The solution provides substantial flexibility, allowing the separation of workloads across various hardware platforms without vendor lock-in. This flexibility makes it adaptable to future infrastructure changes."

"The features I find most valuable are in the gateways themselves. They have done a great job over the years of providing insight into what is happening with our products, with the batches that come through that are scanned. I enjoy that part of it, and it is fairly easy to use from our standpoint once we get to know the product."

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform pros

Cons

"Its read performance can be improved. It is just slow in comparison to other file systems, but a lot of it also has to do with the fact that they have a limited number of spindles under each node."

"The only problem is the current performance of the individual nodes. As a sale-out solution with integrated load-balancing functions, performance is in principle not a problem at all. Capacity and performance are linearly scalable over the number of nodes in the cluster. An increase in the performance of the individual nodes in future releases would be desirable."

"They fixed all the requirements that we had in the beginning. The beginning was a little bit rough, but we tuned it nicely. However, in some cases, they could improve performance."

"It has a learning curve."

"More monitoring from the platform would be good. There is some monitoring, but it is paid. It is a chargeable service. It would be good for that to be included in the base."

"AI and automation features could enhance the platform, such as AI-powered search, predictive storage analytics, and intelligent alerts for proactive monitoring. Predictive storage analytics will help with better capacity planning. There can be some sort of intelligent alerts for proactive monitoring."

"Stability-wise, we just went through one issue that they addressed. We were having cloud sync issues."

"One suggested improvement for the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is the ability to distribute data across multiple active backend storage nodes rather than the current limitation of a single active node."

"However, in some cases, they could improve performance."

"One area for improvement is the migration tool, which at times does not work as designed, necessitating the use of alternative solutions like Robocopy."

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I won't talk about specific numbers, but it is a little hard to compare it to other products out there because there is nobody out there that does exactly what they do. If you are just comparing it to another NAS box, it is probably going to look higher, but that's an unfair comparison because it does things that a NAS box can't do."

"When it comes to pricing, I know the prices because I am also running tenders for customers where I am not offering other solutions. Hence, the prices are pretty competitive."

"So far, pricing seems to be fine."

"CTERA's pricing model is competitive compared to other companies that achieve the same thing. Their closest rival is Nasuni, and CTERA is significantly more affordable than Nasuni."

"It is fairly priced. I am not too involved in the pricing of what we used to pay, but it would have reduced the cost of ownership. I cannot give a figure, but the EMC solution was very expensive compared to CTERA."

"I find the pricing reasonable. They offered us deals that helped us. Especially with the upgrade to a bigger unit last year, they were helpful with the deal."

"I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards."

"CTERA's pricing seems to be on par with some of the other players, such as Nasuni and Azure. They all have benefits, but CTERA is competitive for its features."

"It is hard to compare the costs if we want to retain the same model of a separate high-performance storage or certain things, but it is one of the cheapest solutions available in Israel."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Computer Software Company

68%

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	6

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

I believe CTERA could improve their pricing experience by customizing price lists per region. For example, there is a difference between what is sold to customers in Israel versus U.S. customers. I...

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What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

There’s an issue with permissions, they aren’t always as transparent for customers as Microsoft’s, for example. Integrations with AI could also be improved, and error messages should be clearer, mo...

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What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

CTERA connected us with Bezeq, which is a communications company in Israel that also sells similar solutions, and we also set up a portal. We were then Bezeq's integrator, until Bezeq decided to st...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

File System Software

September 2025

Download Cohesity SpanFS product report

Buyer's Guide

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

October 2025

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform report

Download CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform product report

Also Known As

SpanFS

No data available

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Cohesity

CTERA

Overview

Designed to combine the best of enterprise and cloud stacks, SpanFS exposes industry-standard, globally distributed NFS, SMB and S3 interfaces.

The IO Engine detects random vs. sequential IO profiles, splits the data into chunks, performs deduplication and directs to the most appropriate storage tier.

SpanFS also includes a new Metadata Store based on a consistent, distributed, NoSQL store for fast operations at scale.

SnapTree® provides a distributed meta data structure based on B+ tree concepts. It supports unlimited, frequent snapshots with no performance degradation.

Cohesity

The CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform provides a cloud-native global file system over public and private object storage, revolutionizing the world of hybrid cloud data solutions. Enhanced by a rich data services ecosystem, CTERA enables enterprises to gain full control of their data for optimal edge performance, data insight, and governance. The platform focuses on security, providing features like data encryption, access controls, and ransomware protection. Centralized management tools enable efficient data control and monitoring. The platform is being used to replace legacy NAS and file servers, especially at remote locations, and simplify backup and disaster recovery of file data while providing the flexibility of multi-cloud deployments with infinite scalability. CTERA is at the core of hybrid cloud transformations of some of the world’s largest banks, healthcare organizations, global media groups, and government agencies, in deployments that scale to tens of petabytes.

CTERA

Sample Customers

Tribune Media

McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI

Buyer's Guide

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Cohesity SpanFS

September 2025

Free Report: CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Cohesity SpanFS

Find out what your peers are saying about CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Cohesity SpanFS and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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