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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."
"The user interface is good."
"The product is very reliable."
"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."
"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 solution has improved our performance, reliability, and redundancy."
"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."
"We have found the solution to be quite flexible and very scalable."
"The data compression and deduplication have kept us from buying more disks these past three years."
"ONTAP allows us to scale and grow as needed and also be flexible in the way we operate."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to restore and backup our virtualized servers on demand."
"Security played a major role while finalizing the product. The ONTAP technology was quite stringent while creating partitions and in other such scenarios so that the data is fully secured and not accessible without permission."
"Overall I think it is still a really good environment and using NetApp has been a really good solution for us."
"ONTAP has improved my organization by lowering budget costs. Deduplication, compression, compaction, SnapMirror, SnapWall, the transaction happens from one to the other. It's serving our needs just as expected."
"One of the things I find most valuable is the way they do the Snapshots, taking incrementals at points in time... Often someone will say, "Hey, I deleted this thing yesterday, can you get this back for me?" It's good that we have all those incremental Snapshots at different points in time that we can refer back to, to get them whatever they need."
"The solution is very easy to configure."
 

Cons

"The solution is quite stable, although they have not quite worked out all of the kinks."
"The product must adapt to other storage technologies like HPE 3PAR."
"The solution should provide extensive reports on backups and backup failures."
"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."
"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."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"While I utilize it for data migration, I would love to do that data migration in a GUI from an ease of use perspective."
"Customers do not choose PowerPath unless they have Unix or Linux."
"The rate of technology could be improved."
"ONTAP's GUI does not encompass all the features available in the CLI."
"Being able to scale out at cost-effective capabilities doesn't compare to some of our other storage solutions, but it is coming along. NetApp ONTAP could improve its scalability."
"The additional features I would like to see in ONTAP, and NetApp in general would probably be the single pane of glass software."
"The initial setup is too complex. It should be one click. Anyone with basic knowledge of storage should be able to set it up. Instead, there are too many moving pieces."
"I would like to see more integration into the cloud, as we are pushing to do more cloud-based compute."
"The initial setup is too complex. It should be one click."
"NetApp ONTAP has several limitations that we encounter, primarily related to large enterprise clients. They do not affect small clients that NetApp may have. While these limitations are clearly described, some issues require us to develop workarounds."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is fair."
"Pricing is good. I don't have any issues with the pricing of this solution."
"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 solution is expensive."
"The solution has helped us reduce the overall cost of storage by doing an OPEX agreement with NetApp, we are paying based on utilization. Instead of fronting 30 petabytes worth of storage, we are paying for what we're using."
"There are specific workloads where some vendors provide better value, but in general, NetApp has done a far better on price than other vendors."
"At first, it's expensive. Once you start using it, it's not that expensive. When you see all the benefits, it's acceptable. It could always be better, but you get what you pay for."
"The price could be a little bit cheaper, but you get what you pay for."
"We have been able to save about 3TB to 5TB of storage. We still need to do more on the compression bit, then provisioning, to save more going forward."
"They could reduce the price."
"With the duplication and compression, we have been about a one and half to two times savings since we are not running all-flash."
"Depending on the licensing you choose the price varies. For our company and our needs, the cost is very fair."
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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.