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Dell PowerPath vs NetApp ONTAP comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 8, 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
7.2
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Storage Software category, the mindshare of Dell PowerPath is 16.5%, up from 15.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp ONTAP is 20.5%, down from 35.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Storage Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp ONTAP20.5%
Dell PowerPath16.5%
Other63.0%
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.
EA
Manager, System at a media company with 10,001+ employees
Unified storage has simplified secure data sharing and efficient cloning across our organization
NetApp ONTAP provides a unified storage architecture for managing both SAN and NAS protocols. The cloning functionality using NetApp Snapshots is excellent for our production to development system cloning. The clone step is straightforward, as I can select the snapshot and perform the cloning immediately. The security features in NetApp ONTAP are definitely valuable. NetApp encryption offers two levels of encryption: aggregate level encryption and volume level encryption. Without the encryption key, data cannot be accessed, which provides strong data protection. The deduplication function also works well in NetApp ONTAP.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has improved our performance, reliability, and redundancy."
"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."
"We have found the solution to be quite flexible and very scalable."
"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."
"It provides a high availability and will increase the performance of any server or operating system."
"In the last four or five years, we have not had any issues."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is migration without disruptions."
"If someone was looking to buy one I would say: I love the ONTAP operating system."
"They have very good tech support who always answers our questions and troubleshoots our issues. They're great."
"Overall, for us, it's the stability, it has a solid infrastructure. It's easy to use, easy to rack and configure and start utilizing really quickly. It's been very stable, it works great, and it does everything we would want it to do."
"Deduplication, data protection, and NetApp block are some of the valuable features of the product."
"With other vendors, we need to buy a separate license for a third-party storage, but with NetApp, you don't need to buy a license, as it will come up with the storage."
"The data compression and deduplication have kept us from buying more disks these past three years."
"CIFS and NFS protocols have delivered the most value. NetApp ONTAP offers very reliable CIFS and NFS protocols."
"SnapMirror is a good solution, because we can take our production data and replicate it over to our DR data center with minimal administrative effort, which is huge."
 

Cons

"The product must adapt to other storage technologies like HPE 3PAR."
"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."
"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 is quite stable, although they have not quite worked out all of the kinks."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"Customers do not choose PowerPath unless they have Unix or Linux."
"The technical support is good but they are not available all the time."
"The solution should provide extensive reports on backups and backup failures."
"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."
"We would like to be able to provide feedback immediately after receiving technical support."
"There have been some random crashes we have had though, from a couple weird things."
"I have encountered a couple of issues with data deduplication and compression."
"The technical support is poor. The first line people that pick up the phone are, quite honestly, awful."
"ONTAP's GUI does not encompass all the features available in the CLI."
"The lack of an API is a big thing for us that needs to be improved. It needs proper API support."
"There is a lot a lot of functional integration that we look forward to for improvements. I'm learning where they're going and I'm very interested to see those improvements and how they can help us."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is good. I don't have any issues with the pricing of this solution."
"There are no additional costs associated with the product."
"The product is a little bit expensive."
"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."
"The price of the solution is fair."
"NetApp ONTAP is a pricey product, but you pay for what you get. I rate NetApp ONTAP a five out of ten for its pricing."
"ONTAP has helped our organization reduce its overall cost of storage (somewhere in the high millions)."
"The pricing for NetApp ONTAP is moderate."
"NetApp is streamlined, reducing costs."
"There could be improvements, its proprietary software so it can be pricey."
"NetApp provided the features required within our cost limit."
"We save a lot because of the deduplication and compression."
"Our cost per IOP is three to four dollars, but we have a hybrid solution. Therefore, we have SSD and spinning disk running together."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Transportation Company
15%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

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 Business10
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise69
 

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?
I have encountered a couple of issues with data deduplication and compression. If there were an option to set up those items separately, it would make it easier to configure and monitor those aspects.
 

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: November 2026.
921,148 professionals have used our research since 2012.