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CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs Office 365 comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 29, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.2
CTERA's platform saves time and reduces costs, eliminating SSD needs and manual storage, with a two-year expense recovery.
Sentiment score
6.3
Office 365 offers cost savings and productivity boosts via subscription models, integrated tools, time savings, and enhanced security.
Adding SSD storage to Windows file servers is expensive, and we no longer need to back up those devices.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
I am positive that CTERA has helped reduce the total cost of ownership by eliminating the need for manual storage management and reducing storage service processes.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
Internal surveys show a 20% increase in team productivity due to better collaboration in Microsoft Teams.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Though money is not saved directly, time is saved significantly due to its user-friendliness, reducing the need for extensive user training.
IT operation manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.9
CTERA's support is highly rated for its accessibility, quick response, knowledgeable team, and effective global storage management.
Sentiment score
4.2
Office 365 customer service is praised for efficiency and expertise, with suggestions for improved communication and additional support channels.
They swiftly address concerns and take ownership of the call, providing a very satisfactory support experience.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
The quality and speed of support for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is some of the best in the industry.
Senior Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
High-priority issues are handled promptly.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
At times if you're trying to use their online support, they'll send you to an article that may or may not have anything to do with what you're looking for.
Controller/HR Manager/IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
For complex issues, premium support tickets are usually handled within a few hours, providing a great experience.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
CTERA's platform excels in scalability and flexibility, supporting global use with easy upgrades, despite minor licensing challenges.
Sentiment score
7.5
Office 365 is highly scalable, accommodating diverse global teams efficiently, with licensing costs as a key consideration.
If we need to upgrade CPU and memory, we should be able to do that without a license upgrade.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow.
Senior Manager of Global Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It offers good scalability options, including vertical and outward scalability.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
Office 365 offers virtually limitless scalability.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Whenever scaling up is required, procuring additional licenses is easy unless it is under an EA plan.
IT operation manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is stable, with resolved issues and occasional sync problems not disrupting overall reliability.
Sentiment score
7.4
Office 365 is praised for stability and reliability, with occasional performance issues and Microsoft’s valued 99.99% uptime guarantee.
It has been pretty stable since then.
System Administrator at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
We had things deployed for years, and we were suddenly getting cloud sync issues that were crashing our sites.
Senior Manager of Global Support at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It is very stable and reliable.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
Microsoft provides a 99.9% financially backed guarantee.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
The integration capabilities of Office 365 with Word, Excel, and Outlook with OneDrive for cloud storage have been smooth and work well.
Controller/HR Manager/IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
At this time, whatever they have meets the needs, and they are expanding the number of participants to Team meetings and other features.
IT Administrator at a university with 51-200 employees
 

Room For Improvement

CTERA could improve monitoring, updates, user portals, logging, data distribution, legacy upgrades, AI integration, file editing, and permissions.
Office 365 users seek language expansion, improved compatibility, better support, refined features, and more training resources for optimal use.
AI and automation features could enhance the platform, such as AI-powered search, predictive storage analytics, and intelligent alerts for proactive monitoring.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a performing arts with 501-1,000 employees
The main problem is that if two people are working on the same file, for example, one in the U.S. and one in Israel, they can overwrite each other’s work without any notification.
CEO at rtt.co
It would help to have a global single-pane-of-glass view of all my CTERA devices.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
I believe the choice of office apps often depends on the existing ecosystem of the business, and since Office 365 has comprehensive coverage, I am not missing any features that the competition provides.
React Native Team Lead at Visible Magic
The interface for the security and compliance center could be simplified.
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
It has been observed that support personnel often lack hands-on experience, and more training is required.
IT operation manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

CTERA offers affordable enterprise file services, reducing total ownership costs compared to EMC, NetApp, and Nasuni, enhancing market accessibility.
Office 365 provides competitive pricing and diverse plans, though licensing can be confusing and improvement is needed in cost transparency.
Unlike other solutions that require hardware purchases, CTERA offers software licensing with flexibility across multiple infrastructure providers.
Business Development Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
CTERA’s pricing should be more proportional and accessible so that cost is not the factor preventing customers from purchasing.
CEO at rtt.co
CTERA's pricing seems to be on par with some of the other players, such as Nasuni and Azure.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
the cost of using the Microsoft ecosystem is higher than the combined cost of using Notion and Slack.
Project Management Associate at MPost
My experience with the pricing or licensing of Office 365 is that a lot of times we've gotten them when they've been on sale, so we've had really good pricing for the Microsoft products.
Controller/HR Manager/IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Office 365 is that it is moderate.
IT operation manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform offers scalable, flexible data management with seamless backup, user-friendly interface, and reliable recovery.
Office 365 offers cloud integration, real-time collaboration, secure sharing, extensive storage, productivity apps, AI automation, and user-friendly interfaces.
As soon as something is written to the device, CTERA copies it to the cloud, where it's versioned with snapshots so we can recover it.
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
A vital advantage of this platform is its instantaneous recovery capability, allowing seamless access to a secondary gateway if the primary one fails.
Business Development Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
It is a three-in-one solution for us. It is a file-sharing platform, an archiving solution, and also a backup solution.
System Administrator at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
It has improved productivity and functionality by providing all necessary tools in one suite.
CCC at FlowSec
The most valuable feature is SharePoint, where we can easily put files and make them accessible to any person who has access.
Project Management Associate at MPost
Office 365 has positively impacted my organization by making the salespeople more accurate because they've been able to use the features in Excel instead of relying on the calculator or adding machine.
Controller/HR Manager/IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...
Ranking in Content Collaboration Platforms
10th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (2nd), NAS (4th), Cloud Migration (5th), Cloud Storage (5th), Cloud Backup (8th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (8th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st), AI Legal & Compliance (1st)
Office 365
Ranking in Content Collaboration Platforms
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
152
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Content Collaboration Platforms category, the mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 1.6%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Office 365 is 10.3%, up from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Content Collaboration Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Office 36510.3%
CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform1.6%
Other88.1%
Content Collaboration Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Tim M. - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Collaboration has transformed how our teams work and Copilot now drives faster daily decisions
The interface for the security and compliance center could be simplified. It changes frequently, which can make it somewhat difficult for admins to stay up-to-date on where specific settings are located. The compliance center modification or improvement of Office 365 needs to be introduced. The rest of the features feel acceptable to me. The reason it is not a ten is because of the complexity of managing the vast array of admin settings, which requires a specialized IT team. Even though it meets industry standards for decent security compliance such as SOC and HIPAA, the complexity of managing the admin settings needs to improve.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
65%
Outsourcing Company
5%
Educational Organization
4%
Financial Services Firm
3%
Computer Software Company
15%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Performing Arts
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business62
Midsize Enterprise29
Large Enterprise70
 

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...
What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
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 America...
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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Office 365?
I didn't inquire about the specific costs of transitioning from the previous tools. However, I was informed that the cost of using the Microsoft ecosystem is higher than the combined cost of using ...
What needs improvement with Office 365?
I don't have any ideas off the top of my head at the moment about what I would improve about Office 365. I can't think of anything that frustrates me about the tools. I mentioned that I use Copilot...
What is your primary use case for Office 365?
We use the Microsoft Office 365 suite for personal purposes. We use Teams for communications, and we use Azure DevOps for some of our workflow management. I use Office 365 for Outlook for emails. I...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Office 365, Office 365 Enterprise, Office 365 Enterprise E1, Office 365 Enterprise E3, Office 365 Enterprise E5, Office 365 ProPlus, Office 365 Business, Office 365 Business Essentials, Office 365 Business Premium, Office 365 F1
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI
Me & the Bees Lemonade
Find out what your peers are saying about CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Office 365 and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.