CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights comparison

CTERA and NetApp are both solutions in the Cloud Migration category. CTERA is ranked #5 with an average rating of 9.1, while NetApp is ranked #14. CTERA holds a 4.2% mindshare in CM, compared to NetApp’s 3.4% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of CTERA users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...

Read 11 CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform reviews

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91% willing to recommend

NetApp Data Infrastructure ...

Read 13 NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights reviews

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288 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...

NetApp Data Infrastructure ...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 2, 2025

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform and NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights are leading solutions in data management. CTERA stands out for pricing and support, while NetApp is favored for its comprehensive features.

Features: CTERA is known for scalability, data protection, and hybrid cloud support. It provides resiliency and backup capabilities essential for remote work environments. Users benefit from flexible storage management and compatibility with on-premises and cloud settings. NetApp offers superior visibility and analytics with strong integration capabilities across platforms. Its dashboards and data visualization provide deep insights into infrastructure performance, making it highly valued by users.

Room for Improvement: CTERA could enhance its user web portal, simplify firmware upgrades, and offer more detailed logging and streamlined global management. NetApp users suggest more intuitive reporting capabilities, simplified pricing, and enhanced console interface details. Its licensing model could also be made more transparent.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CTERA is praised for its responsive support, easing deployment across various environments. Its customer service is noted for a hands-on approach and quick resolutions. NetApp receives positive feedback for customer service but not as consistently. Both platforms are easy to deploy, with CTERA highlighted for user-friendly support and proactive engagement.

Pricing and ROI: CTERA is seen as cost-effective, with a lower total ownership cost compared to alternatives like Nasuni. Flexible licensing and no need for hardware purchases increase its appeal. NetApp's pricing is complex, with users facing challenges in cost calculations based on workload variations. Despite higher costs, its comprehensive features offer value, particularly for those requiring deep infrastructure insights.

To learn more, read our detailed CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights

December 2025

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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

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...

Ranking in Cloud Migration

5th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

File System Software (2nd), NAS (4th), Cloud Storage (5th), Cloud Backup (8th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (8th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st), Content Collaboration Platforms (10th), AI Legal & Compliance (1st)

NetApp Data Infrastructure ...

Ranking in Cloud Migration

14th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (50th), Cloud Monitoring Software (41st)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Cloud Migration category, the mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 4.2%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights is 3.4%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Migration Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform	4.2%
NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights	3.4%
Other	92.4%

Cloud Migration

Featured Reviews

Tim M.

Senior Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Supports global file recovery and rapid data versioning across 80 nodes

When we implemented CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform early on, and we've been on the platform for three years, we have three different cloud portals. We have an EU portal, we have an Americas portal, and we have an APAC portal. It would be nice if we could combine that into one portal just for that global single pane of glass look. We've talked with them about that and they say it's challenging just because of some of the structure, but that would be something nice if we could get that. I integrated with Varonis, and because CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform didn't have initially a working relationship with that vendor, it would have been nice had that pre-existed us saying we need this. But that wasn't totally CTERA's fault. There was a lot of challenge working with the vendor to build out that interface. A single pane of glass for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform would be beneficial. Everything else works fairly well. We've never had a point where we couldn't get to something that caused us to have a serious outage, and that to me is the mark of a good software package. It's never really caused us serious issues. We have our issues, that's true, and every software package does. However, we've always been able to meet the needs of the business, and we drive hard on security, stability, and scalability. From the scalability standpoint, that's one of the most important things to us. We're on their capacity-based licensing, so if I need to ramp up another CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform NAS, if we have an M&A, I can easily and quickly spin up another NAS and start doing that data transition fairly quickly. The biggest maintenance issue with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is firmware upgrades. We've done a lot of transition from hardware solution to virtualized infrastructure in order to minimize that hardware lifecycle portion of it. We have to upgrade the firmware and sometimes that can be challenging in the nature of business of our size with 80 CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform nodes around the globe. The issue we've had with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform happened recently in a firmware upgrade where there was a major database back-end upgrade and that took some time. For our smaller sites, it would be an hour or two, and I can build that into a fairly easy change window. But in our larger sites where we may have hundreds of terabytes of data, that database update process took maybe a day or a day and a half. That becomes more challenging, especially in a manufacturing environment where people are wanting to access configuration files. We had to pin the data locally because the data would be available on the local edge filer, but the cloud sync, while it was updating the database, the cloud files weren't available. That would be the other thing I'd like to see an improvement on: some way to do those database upgrades either in a more segmented fashion or in some type of offline environment. I understand the logistics behind that sounds easy, but I'm sure it's not.

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Punit Waghela

Technical Specialist at Softcell Technologies Limited

Reduces troubleshooting time and improves operational efficiency through a single console

NetApp technology, specifically NetApp Cloud Insights, has significantly impacted the way my customers do business. One customer had multiple components, such as a VMware environment, Cisco switches, NetApp storage, and backup tools. Previously, the customer had to monitor all these tools individually each morning by logging into every console to check for errors or performance issues. It used to take them about 1 or 2 hours, but after we installed NetApp Cloud Insights, the time spent was reduced to just 5 minutes with a single console where they could monitor everything. The customer can integrate their VMware servers, Cisco switches, and storage with NetApp Cloud Insights to quickly identify any problems and resolve issues efficiently, demonstrating a reduction in complexity and monitoring time. The values that NetApp Cloud Insights delivers to my customers are evident in real examples, such as an application team running their application on a single VM connected through a switch and storage. When they experience a performance issue, the VMware team needs to identify the source of the slowness, whether it's from the server, switch, or storage, which requires a time-consuming investigation of each component. Without NetApp Cloud Insights, this process is slow and stressful for both the application team and the VMware team, but with the tool, a single click allows the customer to pinpoint the issue directly, improving response times to performance problems immensely. The evolving cybersecurity landscape and the proliferation of AI highly influence my customers' technology decisions, as having NetApp storage in their environment allows them to detect ransomware attacks effectively. NetApp guarantees data recovery in case of such attacks, and here, NetApp Cloud Insights plays a crucial role; it can identify where a ransomware attack originates, allowing the IT team to respond rapidly, such as disconnecting affected devices to mitigate the damage, especially crucial when multiple users are involved.

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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

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

"It makes people think I have my superhero cape on because they're thinking it's all lost, they're doomed, and we're able to quickly and effectively go back and say, 'Here you go,' and it's not hours, it's minutes."

"The solution provides substantial flexibility, allowing the separation of workloads across various hardware platforms without vendor lock-in. This flexibility makes it adaptable to future infrastructure changes."

"CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform helps us when they break something or lose things, and it makes people think I have my superhero cape on because they're thinking it's all lost, they're doomed, and we're able to quickly and effectively go back and say, 'Here you go,' and it's not hours, it's minutes."

"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 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 stood out due to its ease of use and superior security features."

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform pros

"NetApp Cloud Insights helps reduce the time spent on problem resolution by up to 50% for my customers, making their operations significantly more efficient and productive, which is a perfect outcome."

"One feature we appreciate the most is its ability to take snapshots, which adds an extra layer of security and allows us to protect our data effectively."

"Cloud Insights' best features are visibility and the connector to move the workloads."

"All our production clusters are in Cloud Insight. It provides a single pane of glass, giving us visibility into the environment, which allows us to understand if any issues are going on across any of our clusters."

"Cloud Secure is definitely the most valuable feature and being able to see file level activity. It gives real-time alerting on possible ransomware attacks and provides file security review. It helps us to see if something abnormal is happening on the system before it's too late."

"The solution is easy to deploy."

"NetApp Cloud Insights helps with login monitoring and troubleshooting. Previously, if we had performance concerns or needed to interface with other groups and their products, a task that should require only one or two people turned into a six-person job."

More NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights pros

Cons

"It has a learning curve."

"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."

"More monitoring from the platform would be good. There is some monitoring, but it is paid. It is a chargeable service. It would be good for that to be included in the base."

"The issue we've had with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform happened recently in a firmware upgrade where there was a major database back-end upgrade and that took some time."

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

"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."

"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."

"The issue we've had with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform happened recently in a firmware upgrade where there was a major database back-end upgrade and that took some time."

More CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform cons

"There is room for improving the creating and managing or modifying of reports. That is still a difficult task to do and requires knowledge beyond the storage itself. I would love to see reporting improved so that we can create reports by dragging and dropping pieces into a report form and publish a report that way."

"The visualization needs some improvement because there are occasional delays while the system queries information."

"Cloud Insights could offer more detail when we drill down into the Azure environment."

"The IP-based monitoring could be added in a future release."

"In a perfect world we would have something built, right out-of-the-box, that can identify what we call "noise," and reduce the amount of data. You're presented with so much data when you first start the data collectors. For example, it brings back a lot of change rates that happen just because of standard computing, like profile changes and that sort of thing. Being able to identify things like that and categorize them and strip it down—and it probably can do that, I just haven't gotten there yet—would be very beneficial."

"Ease of reporting is one thing that they're trying to tackle. If you have a specific set of data you want from Cloud Insights, you can ask NetApp to help you build the reports from the ground up. The dashboards are intuitive, but finding the report you want is sometimes a challenge. If you don't have the report already loaded, pulling it in and letting it build its data can be cumbersome."

"The support is not very quick."

"Even though I work with NetApp, it still takes time for me to navigate and find components, so new customers might require considerable hands-on experience to efficiently use the console, indicating that it could be more user-friendly."

More NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights 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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"The licensing is complex. The calculation depends on what you're ingesting. A terabyte of one product is not a terabyte of another product. Virtual machines don't equate so easily. It's all about the end-use managed units and having an easy place to reference how far those units go."

"The solution is expensive."

"We are billed based on management units, so we can purchase units based on six months, twelve months, twenty-four months, or thirty-six months upfront or pay as you go depending on our requirements."

"The solution's pricing is based on the device you purchase and includes support services."

"The licensing model could be improved. We love that you can use it for free for looking at NetApp products. You only need licenses to look at non-NetApp products, but as soon as you do that, you start utilizing licenses that actually would have been free in the public. So, there is a bit of an anomaly in the licensing model."

"Be aware of the capacity licensing and understand how that works, because it is based on capacity. Getting an understanding of that is the biggest thing."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

65%

Outsourcing Company

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

27%

Computer Software Company

15%

Consumer Goods Company

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	8

Questions from the Community

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

I believe CTERA could improve their pricing experience by customizing price lists per region. For example, there is a difference between what is sold to customers in Israel versus U.S. customers. I...

See all answers

What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?

See all answers

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

We have approximately 80 nodes around the world and we're using CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform mostly for unstructured file storage.

See all answers

What needs improvement with NetApp Cloud Insights?

In my opinion, one area where NetApp Cloud Insights could be improved for the next release is the console, which I find a bit complex. Even though I work with NetApp, it still takes time for me to ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for NetApp Cloud Insights?

It is a monitoring and analysis tool. In our environment, we have different technologies such as VMware, Nutanix, or maybe a backup tool. Instead of monitoring them through different consoles, with...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering NetApp Cloud Insights?

NetApp Cloud Insights delivers significant efficiencies in addressing performance issues as experienced by an application team running on a single VM. The VMware team must methodically check each c...

See all answers

Comparisons

Nasuni vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Compared 20% of the time

Panzura CloudFS vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Compared 13% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft OneDrive for Business vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Egnyte vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

Compared 5% of the time

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Dell CloudIQ vs NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights

Compared 13% of the time

Datadog vs NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights

Compared 10% of the time

Grafana Enterprise Stack vs NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights

Compared 9% of the time

HPE OneView vs NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights

Compared 8% of the time

Instana Infrastructure Monitoring vs NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights

Compared 5% of the time

More NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform

January 2026

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform report

Download CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights

January 2026

NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights report

Download NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights product report

Also Known As

No data available

Cloud Insights

Interactive Demo

CTERA

Demo not available

NetApp

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

NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights delivers comprehensive capabilities like visibility, usage optimization, and real-time alerting to manage and report resource utilization efficiently.

NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights focuses on strengthening data security and enhancing performance monitoring. Its sophisticated analytics tools offer clarity on complex resource interdependencies, reducing troubleshooting times. With advanced dashboards and data visualization, users can efficiently monitor performance metrics and optimize infrastructure management. While it boasts numerous features, improvements are needed in reporting, affordability, and simplifying the interface.

What are the key features of NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights?

Visibility and Optimization: Tracks resource utilization to optimize operations.
Real-time Alerting: Provides immediate alerts for performance issues.
Advanced Analytics: Uncovers multi-tiered insights for better decision-making.
Snapshot Capabilities: Enhances security by providing recovery points.
Comprehensive Dashboards: Visualizes complex data for performance monitoring.

What benefits and ROI should users expect?

Improved Efficiency: Streamlines performance monitoring and troubleshooting.
Increased Security: Identifies vulnerabilities like ransomware threats.
Resource Optimization: Forecasts capacity needs to prevent bottlenecks.
Seamless Integration: Unifies technologies like VMware and Nutanix for cohesive management.

Organizations implementing NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights across industries can expect improved analysis capabilities and security measures. From finance to healthcare, entities rely on its ability to integrate diverse environments like virtualization or storage management, enhancing predictability and efficiency in their operations.

NetApp

Sample Customers

McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights

December 2025

Free Report: CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights

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