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Dell PowerPath vs NetApp ONTAP comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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

Dell PowerPath
Ranking in Storage Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp ONTAP
Ranking in Storage Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Storage Software category, the mindshare of Dell PowerPath is 15.4%, down from 17.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp ONTAP is 19.6%, down from 41.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Storage Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp ONTAP19.6%
Dell PowerPath15.4%
Other65.0%
Storage Software
 

Featured Reviews

Derrick Brockel - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager of Operations at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
A resilient and reliable solution that has many load-balancing technologies and provides high availability
People who want to buy the solution must create a scorecard of Dell PowerPath against other products. They must run database tests. They must consider factors like pricing, performance, ease of use, visibility, and reliability. They must also run tests to understand which product recovers faster. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
BK
Senior Storage Engineer at Shell
Data management and availability improve operations, but cost and support need attention
For snapshots, there should be something similar to a recycle bin. When someone mistakenly deletes a snapshot, it should be stored for about two days before disappearing from the system. Regarding storage optimization, when purchasing a 10 terabyte disk, after formatting, you can only use approximately 8 terabytes. They should improve this so users can utilize 90% instead of 80% of the disk space. The support response needs improvement, especially for P1 cases. When critical cases are raised, they should ensure they call the customer and follow up properly. Comparing NetApp ONTAP to other solutions such as EMC, the cost of contract renewals and warranties is relatively expensive. They should extend their renewal window beyond the current six months to one year options. A longer warranty period of two years for new systems, controllers, or filers would be beneficial. Overall, they should reduce subscription costs for businesses.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In the last four or five years, we have not had any issues."
"It provides a high availability and will increase the performance of any server or operating system."
"The solution offers load balancing, which is great, the overall functionality has been really good, the setup is really easy, and we have found the solution to be quite flexible and very scalable."
"This multipathing software has certain features which we normally don't have on native multipathing software, especially in terms of load balancing and the way it captures the IO metrics and boosts the performance of different operating systems."
"The solution has improved our performance, reliability, and redundancy."
"The product is very reliable."
"OS-aware multipathing is a valuable feature of the product."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that disaster recovery scenarios are very good and easy to use in Dell PowerPath since it is available in a simplified form."
"The compression works well. We get a 3:1 ratio."
"There has been a very big improvement in the performance, and there has also been a big improvement in the user experience."
"There are more than one features that I appreciate, but what I appreciate the most about it is the ease of management of the volumes."
"I would recommend ONTAP, because I like the platform."
"You can add storage capacity on the fly with Clustered ONTAP. You can add nodes and increase the entire horsepower of ONTAP."
"Our administrative effort is lower; DR is much easier now, as it is essentially just flipping a few switches and we have replicated data up in our DR data center."
"The moment you start using it is when the magic happens."
"It had been a successful solution for the end-users as they were very happy with the solution that was implemented as it resolved all their issues and helped to speed up the delivery."
 

Cons

"If there is an operating system that is discontinued, PowerPath will now also stop the support for that operating system; for example, in the case of Solaris."
"While I utilize it for data migration, I would love to do that data migration in a GUI from an ease of use perspective."
"The solution should provide extensive reports on backups and backup failures."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"Although PowerPath is very mature and has been on the market for more than 15 years there are still a lot of bugs that have been profiled with PowerPath, specifically, during any OS upgrade."
"Customers do not choose PowerPath unless they have Unix or Linux."
"The product must adapt to other storage technologies like HPE 3PAR."
"The solution is quite stable, although they have not quite worked out all of the kinks."
"File level restoration could be improved."
"The GUI of NetApp ONTAP is an area with certain shortcomings that need to be considered for improvement."
"Technical support is not in person nowadays. We have to wait a long time to get an engineer. Then, most of the time, their engineers are not good enough to understand our problems. While we might not be able to explain the problem well, or they are not able to understand the problem well, their solutions are slow to resolution. The response time for tickets is bad nowadays."
"If the customer wants to integrate with another product they need deployment guides."
"They could lower prices so my management doesn't complain about cost."
"They could expand what is possible to do with automation as there are gaps in the Ansible module coverage they have."
"The vendor diagnostics, which allows for movement from one vendor to another vendor using the application technology that is available. It should be able to talk to any vendor, not just NetApp to NetApp. We should be able to replicate the data, so the next feature should not be vendor specific."
"ONTAP tech support needs some improvement, but it has improved quite a bit."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"I rate the product's price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is affordable, and ten is really expensive. Dell PowerPath is an expensive tool."
"There are no additional costs associated with the product."
"The product is a little bit expensive."
"The price of the solution is fair."
"Pricing is good. I don't have any issues with the pricing of this solution."
"The product costs an arm and leg; it's expensive."
"ONTAP has helped us reduce the cost of storage by a lot. We were using IBM XIVs and were paying high costs, except for the maintenance. Now, we are on all-flash and we pay less than what we used to pay."
"We have a wholesale contract with NetApp. We also have NetApp ONTAP On-Demand activation for certain things. We also have some preferential pricing for licenses. The licensing that I see here doesn't apply to other clients in the field. NetApp is expensive, but so are the competitors, making it hard to ascertain precise retail value. However, based on my perspective, NetApp pricing appears competitive."
"It's not an all inclusive model. You have the option to purchase modules to make the entire ecosystem coherent. I would like the option to pay one price and get everything all inclusive, like OnCommand."
"Recently, we have seen ROI."
"There are specific workloads where some vendors provide better value, but in general, NetApp has done a far better on price than other vendors."
"NetApp is streamlined, reducing costs."
"The price point is very competitive and inexpensive compared to what you receive from other vendors in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Transportation Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
11%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise68
 

Questions from the Community

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How does Azure NetApp Files compare to NetApp ONTAP?
Azure NetApp Files is a Microsoft Azure file storage service built on NetApp technology. The platform combines the file capabilities of Azure and NetApp to move critical file-based applications to ...
What needs improvement with NetApp ONTAP?
File level restoration could be improved. Currently, NetApp ONTAP provides volume level restore, but file level restore is somewhat difficult to execute. If NetApp were to provide an option for fil...
 

Also Known As

PowerPath
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Healthcare Residential Service Company
1&1 IONOS, Acıbadem Healthcare Group, Adder Technologies, Aero Vodochody Aerospace
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerPath vs. NetApp ONTAP and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,099 professionals have used our research since 2012.