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Commvault Cloud vs IBM Storage Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 2025

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

Commvault Cloud
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
eDiscovery (3rd), Cloud Backup (2nd), Disaster Recovery as a Service (2nd), File Archiving (1st), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (4th), SaaS Backup (2nd), Threat Deception Platforms (1st), Container Backup Software (1st)
IBM Storage Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Commvault Cloud is 7.3%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Storage Protect is 2.3%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Commvault Cloud7.3%
IBM Storage Protect2.3%
Other90.4%
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Matt Reller - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides extremely fast backup, is easy to manage, and is flexible
Commvault Cloud's automated policies provide the notification we need to ensure our data is secure and managed correctly. Commvault Cloud provides excellent visibility across all of our organization's data. It is extremely important to our organization that Commvault has a unified platform that offers recovery across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS workloads. It has helped our organization improve by simplifying the way we manage our environment. We could not manage the same environment with only half of our current staff. We have yet to find anything in our environment that Commvault does not support. Commvault Cloud's Risk Analysis helps us identify, categorize, and classify sensitive data enabling us to take the appropriate actions to protect it. Commvault does a good job helping us limit our exposure and ensure compliance. Commvault has helped us reduce our data management costs significantly. Compared to Dell Avamar, the costs are vastly different. Commvault is much more cost-effective. We are licensed by capacity, so we don't have to worry about licensing different features. We have all the features that are licensed by capacity. And as far as ongoing support costs and other expenses, they are much lower than what they were with Dell Avamar. Commvault also gives us the flexibility to use any storage we want, while Avamar is tied to the Data Domain, which is not cheap to support. It has helped us reduce our backup time unless we are using Data Domain. This is because we can perform deduplication and compression on the client layer, which reduces the load on the network. We cannot do this with Data Domain. In fact, if we even attempt to perform a quick progress check before sending data to the Data Domain, the system fails completely. We learned this the hard way. We are using many more advanced features in Commvault Cloud than we ever did in Dell Avamar, simply because we had to license each feature separately in Avamar. As a result, we did not perform many backups in Avamar, such as all database backups (DB2, SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL). These backups were performed outside of Avamar. We are now using Direct Connect agents for all of our databases. This allows us to perform incremental backups, which we could not do with the previous method. As a result, we have reduced our backup times by two-thirds, or even more in some cases. Compared to when we were backing up directly to Data Domain, Commvault is now running our backups ten times faster. This has resulted in a significant reduction in our backup times. Commvault has helped us reduce the RPO. Even in Data Domain, it has reduced our storage times by about half. It has also helped us reduce the threat detection time. We reduced the RTO significantly with Commvault. Commvault has helped us reduce downtime primarily due to the increase in the performance of resources.
Syed Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a stable solution."
"The data is well-protected. It doesn't age off until it's copied. That's a big feature right there. When you reach the end of your retention, it does not expire until the secondary copy is completed. That allows you to hold onto data that otherwise would have aged off by retention. I like that feature. It's hard to just delete or lose data using the Commvault platform."
"Commvault helps to ensure broad coverage with the discovery of unprotected workloads. This is important. From the moment that we set it up, we mostly have customers telling us what they need to back up. Then, you can list the machines that are not yet protected. Sometimes, we can see that they are unaware of this, and say, "We didn't know that those servers were not protected yet," or "We did not back them up yet.""
"The Commvault Complete Data Protection interface is straightforward to use."
"The Command Center is provided from the web interface. You can back up the data for everybody, but also you can give everybody the ability to view and restore their data. For example, if a laptop, machine, or environment is owned by X, then X can look in and see the environment and data that he has backed up. He can see everything that he owns and can manage the environment as he wishes. It gives him an excellent view of his environment and infrastructure. Also, if you are a service provider, you can back up data for multiple companies and give everyone an interface for their environment to manage, backup, and restore data. Commvault has done excellent work in this area."
"The solution is very stable and offers a good level of performance."
"Backup and archive with a single window, with a single backup job. You only need to type "c"."
"It is just about as flexible as you can get; simple. You can put it anywhere you want. You can put it on-prem or in your cloud. I could see where a team that's looking for more of a follow the bouncy ball type of solution might get a little confused. "Oh, no. What do you mean I might have to do it this way or I can't do it that way?" Sometimes, people just want to be told what to do. For an enterprise environment, like we are at NDOT, everything we do is not standard. It is not industry standard; it is not normal. We have all kinds of one-offs. We do need flexibility in the solutions that we get. I will say that Metallic has been extremely flexible in that sense, where we are able to follow the bouncy ball if we wanted to. Obviously, we didn't. We did it our way and Metallic, as a whole solution, provided that to us with no issues."
"We optimize our costs of media and storage use, thanks to the Incremental Forever backup. The TDP software provides us many ways to protect our data, so we don't need to use monstrous scripts for doing backups now."
"Regarding technical support, if one has the entire enterprise support, I would rate it a nine out of ten...Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten."
"It protects our data. That is what it is there for."
"It scales well for the amount of clients that we use with it."
"Nothing beats this solution for file backup."
"Overall, my experience with the solution is very positive, and I rate it a 9 out of 10."
"The customization and the ability to backup across all platforms are the most valuable features."
"Disk-based implementation of a data protection solution for multiple sites is a better fit for my complex data protection needs."
 

Cons

"Compared to Rubrik, MongoDB Data Protector, and NetBackup, Commvault is better. The licensing team was quite tricky recently because they stopped the unlimited files for that license. Commvault made a bank of 500GB only, a node-based license can take it, which is disappointing. Reporting needs to be more granular. Also, there should be a showback of data being backed up, and the backup cost to share the cost internally with the department."
"I just wanted to compare the features, which are there in EMC NetWorker, which are not available in Commvault. We have things using Networker."
"Commvault is a rich system that might scare somebody the first time they see it because it feels so huge."
"It would be a bit unfair to say that it's complex, due to the fact that it supports so many different workloads, however, if there's anything that is a bit of a shortcoming, then it's the fact that there's a bit of complexity involved when dealing with the product."
"The only problem is that some of what we snap most of is the VMs. We found about 10% of the VMs that we can't snap because they're too interactive. It actually causes the application to crash."
"We do not use Command Center, but we are using CommCell Console. We're navigating and manipulating the entire environment by using CommCell Console, and we are comfortable with it. We didn't find Command Center user-friendly. We found it a bit difficult to use. It decreases the efficiency of the tasks to be performed. It was probably implemented as a centralized application to manage all environments, but it was probably not a good idea. I and my colleagues across the globe are comfortable with using CommCell Console rather than Command Center."
"The product's migration process and stability need improvement."
"I would rate the customer support five out of ten. Customer support has very closed departments, requiring us to shuffle between them to get one thing done because representatives have limited accessibility."
"Integration with some applications in the healthcare field could be added, as that is a big part of our business."
"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."
"It seems like they are a little behind on the integration to Azure Cloud as well as Amazon."
"Their support is lacking. I've talked to their developers and stuff in the last couple of weeks and they reassure me that some people have retired, and they're working on getting that bumped back up. But the support lacks a lot to be desired at this point."
"It has a lot of areas for improvement. Its reporting for job completion or incompletion can be improved. It should also provide a granular recovery, ease of operation, data life cycle management, and media management. It should support a backup in such a format that in case of a disaster, one can start the virtual machine out of the backup itself. Its reliability can also be better. It is also expensive, and their support is also poor."
"The installation process could be simplified."
"I would like to see the operations center be a lot more functional. It was nowhere near as functional as the admin center, and I'm doing a lot of command line with it."
"They should have a proper technical support team serving the customers and get issues resolved earlier."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is a little bit high."
"It is quite expensive when compared to other applications in the market. Its license is completely based on workload capacity. If I buy a license for 100 terabytes, I can back up anything. I can back up any platform, technology, or application, which is an advantage. Previously, we had to buy an agent for a particular application, and the cost was different for each agent. Now, the cost is completely based on the storage capacity. The license for one terabyte can cost around $1,700 for backing up anything from your environment."
"There is a bit of cost involved with signing up the entire solution. It's not a cheap solution."
"Commvault's pricing model and pricing structure were initially confusing, but once we worked more closely with the company, we were able to transition to a subscription license that saved us a lot of money."
"The solution is expensive, but it is worth the money."
"The complete license gives us options for all the features. Commvault does not license based on storage or the management components. It can integrate with any storage vendor. That means that when we are out of storage and need more, we can integrate without additional licensing. In my opinion, Commvault needs to reduce the licensing cost by 20 to 40 percent to make it cost-efficient."
"Based on the customer's needs, their pricing and model is very confusing sometimes. You need to check with their sales to make sure you are getting the right pricing on whatever you are using. I know that they have simplified a lot regarding the licensing model nowadays, but it is good to always double check and make sure it has everything that you really need."
"The solution is bundled with hardware licensing. If I want to increase the hardware, I have to buy exactly the same because it's based on the core hardware license. We cannot tell discount because we have an NDA signed with Commvault because of my academic license. The solution is more expensive than NetBackup and Veeam but cheaper than Rubrik."
"Its licensing is complex, and its price is not really reasonable. It is on the expensive side. IBM, in general, is slightly expensive, but with IBM Spectrum for the virtual environment, they are looking into the aspect of helping customers with the cost and providing a cost-effective 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."
"Licensing can be either complicated or simple depending on what type of licensing you wish to use and what works best for your environment."
"Spectrum Protect is not a cheap option."
"IBM Spectrum Protect has a fixed price and includes no additional costs."
"IBM Storage Protect is not expensive and fits the needs of all business types. The licensing is based on a capacity-based model. You can take a license for one, two, or three terabytes."
"The pricing is a little expensive for our current employer, so they want to move to a cheaper solution."
"The product is low cost. It is very cool when we design it to using licensing based on post capacity."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business57
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise81
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business53
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise94
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Commvault?
The tool is affordable. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. Implementation requires additional costs because we need Commvault Professional Services.
What needs improvement with Commvault?
Data center backup must be improved. We also want the product to provide us with a cloud-based backup. If we use Microsoft Exchange Online for email services, we want to know how to get a backup in...
What do you like most about Commvault Complete Data Protection?
IntelliSnap and file system backups are valuable features.
What do you like most about IBM Storage Protect?
The best point about IBM Storage Protect is that it can use IBM tape environments, which we still use and will continue to use in the future.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Storage Protect?
IBM Storage Protect is generally an expensive tool. However, with good contracts with IBM or its partners, the cost might not be so high. New customers can expect very high prices.
What needs improvement with IBM Storage Protect?
One point for improvement for IBM Spectrum Protect is security, as IBM has not been investing as much as in the past. There is a need for additional layers of security to fill the gaps, which is wh...
 

Also Known As

Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale X, Metallic, ThreatWise
IBM Spectrum Discover
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aberdeenshire Council, Acxiom, BAM Group Ireland, Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, CI Investments, Clifford Chance, American Municipal Power, American Pacific Mortgage, AstraZeneca, Dongbu Steel, Denver Health, Dow Jones, Emirates Steel, Penn State Health, Prime Healthcare, Sonic Healthcare, Sony Network Communications, TiVO, UCONN Health, The Weitz Company
CEMEX
Find out what your peers are saying about Commvault Cloud vs. IBM Storage Protect and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
866,286 professionals have used our research since 2012.