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Cohesity SpanFS vs Nasuni comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 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

Cohesity SpanFS
Ranking in File System Software
9th
Average Rating
10.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Nasuni
Ranking in File System Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
NAS (12th), Cloud Migration (6th), Cloud Storage (14th), Cloud Backup (34th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (18th), Cloud Storage Gateways (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of Cohesity SpanFS is 5.7%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nasuni is 16.5%, down from 28.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File System Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nasuni16.5%
Cohesity SpanFS5.7%
Other77.8%
File System Software
 

Featured Reviews

SM
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.
SD
Infrastructure Architect at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Cloud data management that achieves cost efficiency with advanced data protection features
I am currently using Nasuni for seismic data. We have a huge data size, and we want to reduce costs. Nasuni acts as a caching solution, so we put some data into the cache, and the rest goes to the blob, which helps us save on costs. We use it for applications like Petrol and Tech Log, where 3D…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has snapshot capabilities. We take advantage of those."
"We switched over to it because it is an integrated solution that includes DataProtect and the platform, has other use cases for enterprise search, and can also do things like antivirus."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Nasuni has helped decrease capital costs by 66% since we don’t need to buy as much excess capacity."
"The feature I have found to be most valuable is the revision control of the files. If somebody deletes or accidentally makes a wrong change to files, we can go back to the revision history and restore the previous versions. That is a very good feature that we rely on."
"We have less downtime and fewer trouble tickets from users who cannot access their shared files. Nasuni has reduced the friction and noise associated with file management because the devices are more reliable."
"We've used it to provide file source capacity for VDI environments. The security of it is important and the fact that it's object storage, it's immutable and that it can't be held for ransom. It's a lot smoother than our previous processes that weren't Nasuni-based. A lot of it is done automatically just by the system being in place."
"Nasuni Management Console (NMC) is super valuable, and both physical and virtual filers are also valuable. NMC is the one-stop place for all our filers, both virtual and physical filers. They are definitely doing a great job in housing all our documents and surveillance videos."
"Nasuni offers us a single platform with a 360-degree view of our file data, which is definitely important to us. It simplifies IT operations tremendously. Because it is taking continuous snapshots, it eliminates a lot of work that was done previously when trying to manage backing up and restoring data files."
"It has the ability to do end-user recovery, or a user can simply contact an admin who can perform a recovery from the management console. The versioning has simplified everything. Now we don't have to worry about those components."
"We have one platform to manage all of our data, to see it and to quickly access it, and that is huge."
 

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."
"The privilege settings need to be more granular, and alerts are an excellent example. If a user doesn't have access to them, they can't see them and access information such as what they may have done wrong, what's there, and when the last sync happened. However, the ability to view alerts also comes with permission to delete them, which is not good, so we need more customization options here."
"One thing to consider is that Nasuni will have the same limitations that a traditional file storage solution will have, although that is because they are taking the place of a traditional architectural model. For example, Office 365 supports collaboration on documents such as Excel files and Word documents, but because Nasuni is a traditional file server, in that sense, it can't make use of that functionality."
"Part of the problem seems to be that Nasuni currently is not set up to do 24/7 support; they said that they were going to do that, so that was a little disappointing."
"The Nasuni file storage platform doesn't work well when there are a high number of small files. This is the case when a directory structure contains more than 10,000 or 20,000 small files, e.g., 5 KB, 10 KB, or 15 KB. When the user is accessing these files from another geographical location, they might face a slow response or timeouts when connecting to the shares, and then to the files. This is because the file size is small. There is a scope of improvement with this solution when it comes to accessing a large number of small files."
"We forecasted that the data at my client's organization would grow by about ten percent annually, but we are migrating more data because we are bringing in some servers that had not previously been within the scope of our license. We expected it would take us two years to reach a specific amount of data, but we hit that mark in one year. The licensing cost skyrocketed, so we need to renegotiate. It puts us in a bind because we are reliant on Nasuni for our service strategy. We can't deny our customers, but we also struggle to pay for that."
"It would be helpful to have more built-in analytics tools to compare the storage costs between the various cloud providers. I would also like some graphing capabilities. We had a tool called Grafana that we used for graphing. I think some more visual analytics like that would be nice."
"The customer portal could be improved, but it has been a while since I've used it. They might already have improved it."
"The performance monitoring could be improved."
 

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."
"Its pricing can get a tad expensive. When we first took Nasuni out, we were just paying for the service. We got storage at a reduced rate. It has now changed, and they're now more of an all-in-one type of thing. It can be quite expensive, but it works out. Apart from that, licensing-wise, it's very simple."
"The cost of licensing is negotiated and billed annually per terabyte."
"It has a license fee as well as hardware costs, which we would incur if we want to use Nasuni Cloud Storage Gateway for upgrades."
"Its price is fair and reasonable. I don't have anything negative about its pricing and licensing. For us, there is also the cost of monitoring. We are monitoring through Xenos and not through Nasuni. That is another cost for us from the monitoring perspective, but as far as Nasuni goes, we don't have any other cost apart from the licensing fee."
"They could lower the cost, but it saves so much money when you go into it (by losing all the backup)."
"There are cheaper forms of storage, but Nasuni is fairly priced for the functionality it offers. I can get basic file shares provisioned in Azure and pay for the storage and the CPU. The overall cost would be much less than Nasuni, but I would need to build the management console and encryption process, so it would cost a lot to develop that kind of functionality."
"Nasuni should provide small-scale licenses, like a 20 TB license. Currently, the smallest is a 30 TB license."
"I would not say it is economically priced, but it is affordable. If you can afford to pay for it, it is worth the money, but it is definitely not overpriced. It is priced about where it needs to be in the market. We were satisfied with the way they did their licensing and how they handled it. I believe they actually license by data size. It is based on how much data is being held on the machine and replicated, and that's completely understandable. So, for us, their pricing was as expected and affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise24
 

Questions from the Community

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Does Nasuni have a good pricing model?
Based on the experience of my organization, Nasuni is definitely worth the money, since it gives you an all-in-one solution where you'd usually need several programs. About the cost, there isn't a ...
Is it easy to restore files with Nasuni?
As someone who has used this feature of Nasuni I can tell you - yes, it's good for file recovery and you'll definitely benefit from very quick times. I can't tell you if it's the best one because I...
What features and services does Nasuni offer?
Hi, if you pick Nasuni, you'll be benefiting from many services for a good price. Well, it's a personalized price you get after an agreement with the company but in my organization's case, it is a ...
 

Also Known As

SpanFS
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Tribune Media
American Standard, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, E*TRADE, Ithaca Energy, McLaren Construction, Morton Salt, Movado, Urban Outfitters, Western Digital
Find out what your peers are saying about Cohesity SpanFS vs. Nasuni and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.