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Commvault Cloud vs Microsoft Exchange comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 4, 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 File Archiving
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (3rd), eDiscovery (3rd), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery as a Service (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (3rd), SaaS Backup (1st), Threat Deception Platforms (1st), Container Backup Software (1st)
Microsoft Exchange
Ranking in File Archiving
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Email Applications (3rd), Wireless Email (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the File Archiving category, the mindshare of Commvault Cloud is 20.7%, up from 15.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Exchange is 10.2%, down from 11.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File Archiving
 

Featured Reviews

Cassandra Cinar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides excellent visibility and helps reduce costs and time
We use intuitive administrative tools that readily reveal the volume of backed-up data. Our Commvault CommCell servers alert us to failed backups and provide detailed information. This transparency allows our managed service provider to easily grasp our pre-established thresholds and readily scale up with new technologies. We're highly satisfied with Commvault's automated data security and management policies. They meet our stringent requirements for secure and private data storage, including anti-ransomware protection and encryption. Notably, they also ensure compliance with GDPR for backups stored in Europe and other regions, fulfilling our regulatory obligations. Threat Scan's ability to scan backup data for threats is invaluable because it proactively identifies and neutralizes certain viruses and threats that may originate from our G Suite or be reported by our security incident response team, preventing potential outages. Commvault provides excellent visibility across our entire organization's data. They perform regular health checks, informing us of areas of strength and offering recommendations for improvement. These recommendations may include upgrading to newer product versions or addressing issues identified during the checks. It is important for our organization that Commvault provides a unified platform for recovery across cloud, on-premises, and software-as-a-service workloads. This is particularly important because many of our existing cloud environments rely on basic backups that are insufficient for our needs. Commvault empowers us to address this issue. We have implemented it not only in our own operating company but also across the corporate structure, rolling it out to virtually all AWS users. This is because the standard backup methods, such as snapshot backups, fail to meet our stringent requirements for recovery, service level agreements, and crucial functionalities like threat detection and other security features. Commvault ensures a robust and comprehensive backup infrastructure that satisfies all our essential needs. It has improved our organization by ensuring we meet our infrastructure requirements, adhere to our vulnerability methodology, and achieve service level agreements for both backup and storage requirements. The quarterly risk analysis allows us to effectively manage the lifecycle of both data and backups. It also sheds light on the types of data and backups we have, providing valuable insights. Commvault's risk analysis is one of the tools we use to meet our compliance requirements and implement the necessary controls for immediate security policy action. To ensure comprehensive data protection and comply with international regulations like GDPR, we rely on Commvault alongside our established financial systems and SOC-compliant practices. Commvault has helped us reduce our organization's data management costs by 75 percent, particularly for long-term backups. We ditched tapes and virtual tapes thanks to Commvault, replacing them with a fully disk-based backup system and cloud backups in AWS and Azure. By implementing Commvault, we've significantly reduced our backup times. This is achieved through a combination of incremental backups and data aging. Aged data is then moved to cheaper disk or cloud storage, ensuring cost-effective long-term retention while still meeting our recovery SLAs. While the overall time savings may be around 10-15 percent, the main benefit is not keeping everything on expensive primary storage and efficiently aging it out. Consequently, retrieving data from the Azure bucket typically takes five days or more, reflecting our agreed-upon SLA. It has reduced our recovery point objective, allowing us to store more backups. However, new regulatory and compliance requirements mandate that some backups cannot be deleted and must be retained indefinitely. To address this while still improving efficiency, we've implemented solutions for long-term data storage and improved data management practices. Commvault has helped our organization not only decrease our threat detection time but also improve threat prevention to such an extent that we often avoid facing the full impact of a threat altogether. By preventing these incidents, we're often unsure of the precise amount of time saved, but the benefit is clear: we don't need to activate disaster recovery mechanisms. It has not only helped us reduce our recovery time objective, but it has also ensured that our backups and long-term storage are secure, thanks to its comprehensive capabilities. In terms of total cost of ownership, Commvault has enabled us to significantly reduce both hardware and media costs for storage and backup. After factoring in encryption and compression, the total savings amount to close to 80 percent. It has been able to reduce downtime, but having a quick recovery plan and policy and SLAs that are published are met regularly.
Hesham Hussain - PeerSpot reviewer
A good solution for large enterprises, but is expensive when compared to other solutions
Regarding the decision of increasing the number of users, it depends on the organization's choice, whether to opt for CapEx or OpEx. Both options involve expenses over the years. Building an in-house Exchange solution requires investing in hardware, storage, connectivity, and administrative resources. Office 365 shifts the budget solely to OpEx as a subscription service. Scalability is another factor. Starting a new company favors Office 365 due to cost efficiency. As the organization grows, the choice depends on available resources and technical expertise. An internal Exchange setup is feasible with skilled engineers, while Office 365 suits those lacking in-house resources.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This is a very stable product."
"The user interface is very easy to navigate."
"It's very user-friendly. It supports a wide range of workloads. It's quite easy to use, it's very powerful and it's scalable."
"Commvault software is a single platform where you can enable whatever you want to use, like endpoint protection. You can enable those licenses on a single platform screen. This is where I see the value ad. This is a single management tool."
"The solution's stability is excellent."
"The solution provides us with a single platform to move, manage, and recover our data across on-premise locations. Some of the guys have been using it to move a virtual machine from VMware to the Microsoft solution, Hyper-V. They back it up and then they restore to the different virtual machine provider, and that works great."
"The product is user-friendly."
"All workloads can be integrated with Commvault. If we use a new technology, Commvault integrates with it. Commvault is a data management solution with support for building the DR side of things. With Commvault we can rapidly back up and restore any application we add to our environment."
"This solution handles all of our primary functionality including email, message delivery, message archiving and calendars."
"Our customers are satisfied with the features included in Microsoft Exchange."
"It's an excellent product from Microsoft. It provides more flexibility to the end-users. As it's connected with Teams, it also enables collaboration."
"All features are useful; they meet the purpose of an email server."
"The email management system is very easy to set up, configure, and use."
"The technical support is fine."
"The product works very well."
"We've been using Exchange as an email platform. Our clients require multi-country, multi-regional email collaboration with controlled mail flow. The most valuable feature is the capability of message tracking and the protection of user data."
 

Cons

"Additional SaaS application support would be good... we have SaaS applications that may not be big enough for Commvault to support yet. Box.com is one we've asked about for years, and it's just not on the radar, as far as I know."
"When you deploy Complete Data Protection for past services, it's more complicated because you cannot directly back up from the previous service host. We have to build a proxy server, like a middleware, to directly access the past database server. It's complex and hard for beginners to figure out."
"Our customers complain that this is a difficult product to manage."
"There is room for improvement in the Knowledge Base and error reporting. I would like to see best practices in the Knowledge Base, and have the ability to diagnose errors without contacting support."
"Commvault could make the product more cost-effective on the public cloud side. We are using this solution to back up whatever is still on-prem. We are not using it to back up what is on the public cloud because we have a native backup solution for that, which is provided by the vendor. As our footprint gets bigger, we will continue to evaluate this, but the last time that we did a cost analysis, the cost was not comparable to the solution that public clouds are offering."
"They could work on the implementation of the features."
"The product is a bit complex."
"With respect to the cloud, they need to offer more integrations."
"I'd like the archiving process to be faster."
"Microsoft Exchange could improve the price."
"They could continue to improve the consolidation and integration of mailbox services to make them more flexible, easier to deploy, and more manageable."
"When an update wants to come, it should just come maybe once or twice rather than having us deal with constant updating."
"The solution could be more secure."
"The pricing could be better, and it could have an easier implementation."
"There is a lot of spam email that comes in, so they should add functionality to help fix this problem."
"We would prefer to be able to manage the solution on the cloud."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It was not very popular because of its previous cost, but they have been working on the pricing, and now anyone can afford to use Commvault. They changed the modeling criteria for their pricing. Previously, there was only the capacity modeling based on your content capacity. In this case, they would give you a license and you would have to pay it. Now, most of the environment is virtualized so you can have the best CPU, VMs, etc. You buy whatever you need and pay for what you need."
"The pricing has improved. It is simplified compared to the way that it was a few years ago. It is fairly straightforward and pretty easy to articulate to customers, which is handy."
"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."
"I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten."
"Compared with other backup technologies, Commvault is a bit more costly, but we are satisfied with the support, the services, and the features that we get with Commvault."
"The solution is worth the money."
"It is cheaper than Veeam."
"I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten."
"Microsoft's licensing structure is too complex, but its prices are affordable, though not cheap."
"There are different prices depending on the customer's use cases and amount of users. The price of the solution could improve."
"We pay for the license annually."
"The price of Microsoft Exchange is reasonable."
"We can get Exchange in the cloud along with the Microsoft 365 license."
"They are flexible when it comes to pricing, unlike most of the other vendors I have dealt with."
"It's working very well. There is no problem, but the price is not the best."
"The solution is expensive to maintain because it requires frequent updates and ongoing server maintenance."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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.
How does Zimbra Collaboration compare with Microsoft Exchange?
Zimbra is a free, open source collaborative software suite. The features I like best are the ease of integration and the email, calendar, and collaboration server with web interface. In addition, I...
What do you like most about Microsoft Exchange?
The initial setup was straightforward and fast.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Exchange?
The licensing and pricing are quite costly, which can demotivate customers from opting for features and upgrades. However, the solution provides value for money if one is well-acquainted with Excha...
 

Also Known As

Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale X, Metallic, ThreatWise
Exchange, MS Exchange
 

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
Paderborn-Lippstadt Airport, Scitec Nutrition, British Airways, InnoGames, Osteology Foundation, Franz Haniel & Cie. GmbH, NTC Contracting
Find out what your peers are saying about Commvault Cloud vs. Microsoft Exchange and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,963 professionals have used our research since 2012.