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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
2nd
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 (35th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (19th), Cloud Storage Gateways (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of Cohesity SpanFS is 5.4%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nasuni is 17.1%, down from 27.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File System Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nasuni17.1%
Cohesity SpanFS5.4%
Other77.5%
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

"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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."
"It has snapshot capabilities. We take advantage of those."
"The features I find most valuable in Nasuni are the unlimited snapshots, antivirus capabilities, auditing, and ransomware protection."
"The biggest and most impressive thing for us is the operational recovery (OR) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities that Nasuni has. If a filer goes down, or an ESX server goes down, then we can quickly recover."
"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."
"The most important feature is that things are backed up automatically in AWS. We have a lot of remote sites where there is a tiny server onsite and, in a lot of cases, we really don't have to back them up because the data is automatically copied to AWS. The cloud replication is the most useful functionality for us."
"The ability to access anywhere, the ease of deployment, and the security are the most valuable features."
"The company and its technology are solid and their solution architects and support teams are EXCELLENT!!"
"The system has so far been doing an awesome job and working as advertised."
"Overall, it has been straightforward and we're very pleased with the Nasuni system."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"We've had some organizational changes that Nasuni has not been able to keep up with, mainly from a data or file system perspective. Moving a filer from one management console has been a challenge. It lacks the flexibility to move files in and out of the management console. We have six management consoles now, and we're constantly telling Nasuni, "Hey, please allow us to move a filer from management console A to B." They can't do that."
"We can recover if data and a Filer are lost because of a possible ransomware event, but even that takes time to recover."
"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."
"Nasuni provides enough reporting to see what's happening. You can see the number of shares, total volume, issues, conflicts, etc., but it doesn't provide much visibility from a content perspective. For example, it doesn't tell you the data age. When you're trying to sort and filter information, the data creation date is a critical factor. Nasuni doesn't give you that. You can't get a count of all the file types, like the number of PDFs, Word docs, and PPT files."
"I would like to see Nasuni create a Dropbox or Box alternative. One of the things that people like about those tools is that they are very easy to implement. They look just like a file server. With Nasuni, you have to be online to get your file storage. With Dropbox, there is a thing running on your PC that downloads the files to it when you need them, i.e., an agent."
"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."
"The speed at which new files are created is something that could be improved. For example, if you create a new file in another country, I won't see it for between 10 and 15 minutes."
"Nasuni could improve cloud integration and documentation of various ways we can leverage the product. It integrates with Azure, but the native Azure File Sync solution lets you divide data into tiers like hot, cool, and archived. Nasuni doesn't allow you to break the data apart into those tiered categories."
 

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 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)."
"It's cheaper than a lot of alternatives but it's not cheap."
"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."
"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."
"Our agreement is set up such that we pay annually per terabyte, and we buy a chunk of it at a time. Then if we run out of space, we go back to them and buy another chunk."
"Nasuni should provide small-scale licenses, like a 20 TB license. Currently, the smallest is a 30 TB license."
"Nasuni pricing is average; it's not too high or too low."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
10%
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: June 2026.
899,645 professionals have used our research since 2012.