CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs Nasuni vs Panzura CloudFS comparison

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...

Read 36 Nasuni reviews

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100% willing to recommend

Panzura CloudFS

Read 7 Panzura CloudFS reviews

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558 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Panzura CloudFS

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform, Nasuni, and Panzura CloudFS based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Nasuni, CTERA, Panzura and others in File System Software.

To learn more, read our detailed File System Software Report (Updated: April 2025).

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File System Software

April 2025

Helped 850,236 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the File System Software category, the mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 8.8%, up from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nasuni is 28.1%, up from 24.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Panzura CloudFS is 16.0%, up from 9.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

File System Software

Featured Reviews

Igal Muginstein

Engineering & Network Division Storage, Backup & Os Team Manager at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

Offers flexibility, fast performance, and ransomware protection

The platform is releasing new features at a fast pace, which sometimes leads to version updates every three to six months. Although updates are generally not complex, it is challenging to stop the production environment during these updates, even if the downtime is just a few minutes. This is a common challenge across all NAS providers. From my perspective, the most important area for improvement is developing a method to perform updates without affecting customer production environments. Additionally, there are some cache size limitations that might become problematic for future use cases, though they don’t impact current applications. Collaboration for NFS and SMB protocols could also be enhanced. Although this issue isn't specific to CTERA, it is something we are working on together to improve. The quality of the versions has improved, but occasional issues still arise. All solutions face this challenge, but we hope to see a continued reduction in the number of bugs. That said, we haven't had any major production problems in the last four years, and we appreciate how responsive CTERA is to our issues. We engage in brainstorming sessions together, and we value this relationship.

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Richard McGregor

Global Server & Storage Manager at Conde Nast Publications

Removes a lot of infrastructure, allows us to restore files instantly, and is simple to work with

I particularly like the restore process. Our financial teams make changes to spreadsheets and other files, and we've got teams using Photoshop files. They make mistakes and need to recover files, and we can do that instantly. We also have users who manage to delete folders, and we can bring them back instantly within a few seconds. Knowing that it's all protected from ransomware is also a very big advantage at the moment with the number of ransomware attacks that you see out there. Nasuni is being very protective of that, which is quite good to hear. There were times when we had to replace the filers we've had issues with, and because we know all our data is protected in AWS, we could just turn them off and spin them up. As quickly as in an hour or so, we were back working with zero downtime. That area of functionality is really good. In terms of ease of management, it's the easiest one you can use. It's very simple. It's very easy to set up, very easy to configure, and very easy to manage.

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Roger Clark

I.T. Infrastructure Manager at Thompson Engineering

Handles file locks effectively enabling seamless remote collaboration in global teams

It has not reduced the data storage cost. We have been trying to come up with a plan internally to archive project data at a certain time frame. However, our data continues to grow, so at the point of 25 terabytes, we had to buy another 25 terabytes license to exceed that threshold. It would have been nice if they had offered them in increments, of 5, 10, 15, or 20 terabytes than having to get a whole chunk of 25 terabytes again for licensing purposes, which is a little costly. It would be nice if Panzura offered data in increments instead of 25 terabytes per license. They have done a pretty good job of development from the point of offering new products. Pricing seems to be high for certain things, such as the audit feature of Panzura Data Services. It would be nice to see who deleted that 100 gig of data out there. They should make the pricing plan more attractive for a company of our size. We have almost 700 employees over the southeast from Texas to Florida and up to Tennessee, so we are a pretty big region.

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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

"Our main reason for going for this solution was the uncontrollable growth of file data. It was unsustainable on our previous platform or technology. We needed something scalable like CTERA, so it was the scalability that we required."

"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."

"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."

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

"The solution provides data eviction, where unused data is evicted from the local file, freeing up space. It also allows data to be rehydrated from the cloud when needed."

"The support is awesome. It is top-notch. I would rate their support a ten out of ten."

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

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform pros

"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."

"The features I find most valuable in Nasuni are the unlimited snapshots, antivirus capabilities, auditing, and ransomware protection."

"I particularly like the restore process. Our financial teams make changes to spreadsheets and other files, and we've got teams using Photoshop files. They make mistakes and need to recover files, and we can do that instantly. We also have users who manage to delete folders, and we can bring them back instantly within a few seconds."

"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery. We can fully recover a site in two hours."

"I can see who is logging in on files from all over the globe. For example, if a file is locked, maybe a user in Shanghai has locked files or something, I can see that from the Management Console, then unlock the file."

"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."

"My clients are happy with Nasuni because the transmission is seamless, and it consolidates all the existing file servers into one location. Also, Nasuni has no boundaries. It's infinitely expandable. They don't have to rely on the service provider for backup and restoration. It's self-serve."

"Its dependability and auditing capabilities are very important to us to be able to maintain a chain of custody of the information."

More Nasuni pros

"The main thing in Panzura is that there are three key components: PanFS, NAS, and collaboration. These are strong features, and a big benefit is that you can access everything from anywhere."

"Panzura is a hundred percent better than what we had before."

"Primarily, it is the way Panzura CloudFS handles the file locks and the way these filers, along with the authoritative copy of all our data, which is about 27 terabytes located in an AWS bucket in the cloud, operate."

"For instance, if I'm in India but need to access data in China or Spain, it simplifies the process and enhances collaboration."

"Panzura has not increased its data storage costs."

"The assistance of support has been excellent."

"The core function of Panzura CloudFS, with its synchronizing of files across multiple servers, provides us with a much more efficient workflow for our production staff."

"What I appreciate most about Panzura CloudFS is that it really solves the problem we had when we moved all our server workloads to Azure, reducing our on-prem data center footprint sizably. We don't have to maintain a huge on-prem storage array, which is nice. It just works, and we haven't had any issues this whole time."

More Panzura CloudFS pros

Cons

"It would help to have a global single-pane-of-glass view of all my CTERA devices. We have different regions, and we must log in to each portal to see what's happening with those. It would be nice to have a single portal to see the health of the devices, versions, and firmware upgrades. Sometimes, we want to dive into something more complex, like investigating why CTERA storage usage grew from 2 terabytes to 4 terabytes in a week. That's a little challenging. It's something we would like to see on the road map."

"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."

"The new Edge filer that they have comes with a lot more features than what we purchased. It would be better if we are able to add those extra features without having to swap out the hardware. A clear upgrade path for legacy customers would be beneficial."

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

"One of the bigger things that I would like to see is additional logging. There are logs in there. They provide us with the initial logs on what is happening on our CTERA device. I appreciate that, but they do not give us any further information. I would like to have more information on the logs themselves."

"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."

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

"The web portal that our users access to view data and backups could be optimized. CTERA could apply some of the improvements made to their administrative interface on the user side. The administrators are a much smaller group of people than the users, so it would be helpful if they targeted user experience resources to them."

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform cons

"Some of their cross-platform features are really good, but it could always use more."

"Migration from existing systems, specifically StorSimple, could be improved, but that solution will be end-of-life by the end of the year. Also, the documentation could be more accessible."

"There is some room for improvement when it comes to monitoring. We are not using Nasuni monitoring. We are using our own monitoring through Xenos. Nasuni can provide better monitoring capabilities for us to monitor all the filers and NMC so that we don't have to use a third-party tool."

"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."

"Its interface design or the graphic user interface design can be slightly tweaked in some areas. Some built-in setup wizards would be very beneficial. Rather than having to go in and configure it by hand, there should be more setup wizards for onboarding new data shares and getting it set up the way you want. I don't know if these are on their roadmap, but I sat down and talked to them about some of the work concerns, some of the things that we liked, and some of the things that we didn't like. They are probably working on that."

"Nasuni does not support different retention policies within the same volume, so you have to keep creating volumes for retention policies. When you create a new volume, it means you're starting from zero all over again. You can't move data between two volumes. You have to move them from your physical device to Nasuni or your cloud device to Nasuni."

"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."

"The only issue we face with Nasuni is from the performance perspective. Sometimes, when we deploy a Nasuni device, it doesn't meet our requirements. It's a capacity-planning issue."

More Nasuni cons

"It is a little costly. The NFS service needs development. While Windows and SMB are effective, the NFS service shows some lag, making it a pain point for our many clients who use Linux devices."

"Previously, a new update would come out, and there might be something wrong with it, or it may not sync up as well as it should, or it may cause something to lose access to the server."

"It should be easy for people not on the network to connect and access their files."

"It is a little costly. The NFS service needs development."

"There are a few file types that do not work well with Panzura CloudFS. Specifically, the GIS data formats, such as a geo database, have been found better kept outside of Panzura CloudFS."

"One area for improvement regarding Panzura CloudFS is moving away from on-prem or local Active Directory. We're exploring a transition to Azure AD or Entra ID, aiming to keep the product functional without heavy reliance on the local Active Directory."

"It has not reduced the data storage cost."

"Master Snapshot feature is the only exceptional feature, but the rest of the features are similar to other storage solutions."

More Panzura CloudFS cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"The cost is based on the capacity, which is approximately $100 USD per terabyte."

"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."

"It's cheaper than a lot of alternatives but it's not cheap."

"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."

"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."

"It is around $850 per terabyte per year. Any additional costs that you would incur are for the local caching devices that you'll need to access Nasuni. You kind of provide your own virtual machines or compute to access the data. You also pay for the object storage. So, there are three parts to it. There is the Nasuni license per terabyte. You would also pay for the actual object storage in the cloud, and then you would pay for virtual machines to access the storage."

"The pricing is on par with everybody else, and fair."

"With this solution, the license renewal is pretty swift. With the virtual appliance, you just need to take care of the OS versions and patches. In a way, we don't have to struggle much with renewals because the only thing that we need to take care of are the licenses. We renew it every three years. This aspect goes with infrastructural costs because it doesn't cost us too much to maintain the solution."

More Nasuni pricing and cost advice

"The pricing seems high on certain products and features, such as the audit feature of Panzura Data Services. They should consider more attractive pricing for companies of our size. The renewals are yearly, but the pricing is a little high for us."

"The solution's pricing is on the expensive side."

"It is not bad. It is like everything else. Pricing has gone up quite over the last couple of years, but everybody's pricing has gone up. For what they deliver, it is right in line with what everybody else has."

"Overall, it is quite costly compared to NetApp and similar solutions."

"It's competitive. I don't know what competitors are charging, but they have been very transparent, which is nice, and we've negotiated to avoid percentage increases."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

70%

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

University

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Construction Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Construction Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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

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

What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

One area for improvement is the migration tool, which at times does not work as designed, necessitating the use of al...

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

We use it as a hosted cloud solution. We had initially tried Azure File Sync, but that did not work. Due to certain s...

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 so...

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 definitel...

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...

What are the products that Panzura provides?

Panzura offers four main products: CloudFS, data services, smart apps, and global services. They call this "all-in-on...

What kind of industries does Panzura serve?

Hello, I think businesses from all industries that have their data on a cloud can benefit from Panzura. Especially if...

Why was Panzura acquired? Is the acquisition going to cause a change?

I think Panzura may change in a positive direction now that it's been bought by Profile Capital. That's a very big i...

Veeam Data Platform vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Comparisons

Compared 14% of the time

Egnyte vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft OneDrive vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Compared 9% of the time

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform Competitors

Egnyte vs Nasuni

Compared 11% of the time

Qumulo vs Nasuni

Compared 7% of the time

Rubrik vs Nasuni

Compared 7% of the time

AWS Storage Gateway vs Nasuni

Compared 6% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Nasuni

Compared 5% of the time

More Nasuni Competitors

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Panzura CloudFS

Compared 11% of the time

More Panzura CloudFS Competitors

Product Reports

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

May 2025

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform report

Download CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform product report

Download Nasuni product report

April 2025

Download Panzura CloudFS product report

Panzura CloudFS

April 2025

Also Known As

No data available

Panzura Freedom

Interactive Demo

CTERA

Demo not available

Demo not available

Panzura

Overview

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

Nasuni is a file data services enterprise focused on assisting firms with their digital transformation, global expansion, and information awareness. The Nasuni File Data Platform is a suite of cloud-based services designed to enhance user productivity, ensure business continuity, provide data intelligence, offer cloud options, and simplify global infrastructure. This platform and its auxiliary services are projected to replace conventional file infrastructure such as network attached storage (NAS), backup, and Disaster Recovery (DR), with an expandable cloud-scale solution. By storing file data in scalable cloud object storage from multiple providers, Nasuni positions itself as a cloud-native alternative for traditional NAS and file server infrastructure. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Nasuni serves sectors like manufacturing, construction, technology, oil and gas, financial services, and public sector worldwide, offering its services in more than 70 countries.

Reviews from Real Users

James J., IT Manager at a marketing services firm, says Nasuni’s management dashboard is helpful because he's able to view all of the different filers at once rather than check each one of them individually. He values the software’s security, reliability, good performance, helpful alerting, and responsive support.

According to a Server Engineering Services Lead at a mining and metals company, Nasuni offers good OR and DR capabilities, performs well, offers data security, and continuous file versioning helps recover from hardware failures.

The Managing Director of IT at a construction company appreciates Nasuni because it eliminates a lot of work that was previously done when managing backing up and restoring data files.