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Eaton UPS vs Schneider Electric-APC Smart-UPS VT [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

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

Eaton UPS
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Data Center Power Solutions (1st)
Schneider Electric-APC Smar...
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

JC
Radiation Oncologist at East Oregon Cancer Center
Provides more uptime for our Linear Accelerator, resulting in better patient care
The battery life seems to be pretty good. I don't have a lot of experience with other units of its size, but it does a good job of keeping our unit up. There is no active power management. It just keeps the power up. We haven't had any power failures that are long enough to completely drain the battery. It's been good for small power failures. In addition, I can access the built-in webpage on the UPS and use that to look at the status. It's on all the time and monitoring. It gives us an email once a month telling us that our device is working properly. It will also list the power events that happened in that month.
Reasonably priced, simple to install, and responsive technical support
Mexico's situation is too difficult. While there may be many complaints, many projects may be canceled because funds are not currently available. I want to improve a lot of things, but the main point is money. The vendor could be better, but the point is that we don't have the right vendor in Guadalajara. Guadalajara is a small town in Mexico, and there are no expert engineers in that field here. We need to hire people from Monterey, and from Mexico, which is why the solution may be expensive. We don't want to buy a cheaper solution because cheaper isn't always better. We have no desire to save money, we would like a solution. Schneider's vendor, I believe, needs to be more involved with the customer. We have to constantly look for them because they don't come to me. I have to go there, and I don't want to. I don't want to waste time looking for a vendor. We require immediate attention. It should be easier to contact technical support.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The battery life seems to be pretty good. I don't have a lot of experience with other units of its size, but it does a good job of keeping our unit up."
"It's also very important that the solution is a three-phase UPS. Three-phase cuts down on power usage, which cuts down on our electrical bill, compared to a single-phase product."
"The most valuable feature is that they work. They've been really reliable for us. They come as advertised. There is also a nice network feature that allows us to monitor them."
"VMMS is a good feature. There are multiple charging units inside each UPS. For example, on my 9395 I have three to four charging units and the unit will scale down. Let's say I've got a megawatt of power. If I'm only running 200 Kw I can drop the charging units down and rotate through the charging units to reduce energy. They do all that."
"Their service and their relationship with their customers is their biggest value, absolutely, compared to the competitors that I've dealt with... the service organization of Eaton is one of their strongest points."
"The most valuable feature is that they don't go down. We haven't had any other UPSs in this location, but we've had Chloride UPSs at other places and they didn't do so well."
"It's also very important that it's a rack-mountable, three-phase UPS. Some of the equipment we run requires a three-phase, such as HPE BladeSystems and some of the Cisco core devices."
"The footprint is standard, the same thing as every other solution that we could have gotten. But the power density in relation to its footprint compares really well. I have an APC that has the same footprint that's 20kW less. The Eatons have the same footprint but more power."
"Stability is one of the key points. The durability and lifetime of the product are also notable."
"I like it because we don't have any problems."
"You can scale it by adding batteries."
"We have not had a lot of issues over the many years we have been using the solution."
 

Cons

"Outside of a full-service contract, my only concern is technician availability for repairs. Where we don't have a full-service contract with them, which unfortunately is the larger portion of our equipment from them, we're just like anybody else, waiting for a slot for a technician to arrive."
"If they could reduce the footprint even more, that would be great. And they could always make heat dissipation better."
"I would like to see there is a little more clarity on what the issue is on the notifications that we receive. This would make it easier for us. What we have to do now is sometimes go to the UPS to figure out exactly what the issue is, because it's not always clear."
"I do like the ESS mode which I operate with the 9395s. However, I've got an issue with one of my UPS strings here in Denver: That ESS mode is too sensitive to utility noise. So the utility shows no outages but I've got the UPS switching it in and out of ESS mode."
"The industry is going to a smaller footprint, but that does come at a cost, specifically for battery reserve time, size and density of the system, and BTU generation. Those three areas contribute to the heat generation factor. I think that they've done a really good job. But, when you look across our infrastructure, it's the UPS system that takes up the most space of any of our products."
"One time, a feedback breaker in a system-bypass module, or something like that, was tripped. We brought them in to see what caused it. They figured it out and we haven't had an issue like that again, since."
"The external monitoring solution could use further enhancements. I'm thinking of business continuity. If an internal legacy monitoring solution goes down, and it has no one to connect to the outside world, then it can't send out an alert. How are we going to be able to determine that there is a problem with that UPS if it loses network connectivity?"
"The battery life of the older batteries is the only thing that has been our issue up to this point. Luckily, the Cellwatch system that is on there identifies it and notifies us ahead of time when we should get them changed pretty quickly. This may be addressed with the lithium-ion batteries, but it is too early in our ownership of a UPS with a lithium-ion battery to know."
"We have been having some issues with the solutions controller and we are having problems finding spare parts."
"The duration of the batteries could be much better."
"Schneider's vendor, I believe, needs to be more involved with the customer. We have to constantly look for them because they don't come to me. I have to go there, and I don't want to. I don't want to waste time looking for a vendor. We require immediate attention."
"The solution’s pricing could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I have a maintenance contract with Eaton, which has been very good. The notifications that we receive, we use email to my team, and they work well."
"We use their service plan, which includes parts so we don't do the maintenance on it ourselves. We have a service plan that we use, then they do all the maintenance and periodical maintenance (PM) work. If there are any hardware failures, then they also do the work. Therefore, it's a hardware/software support contract that includes labor."
"It is an expensive technology. The maintenance is expensive. The batteries are expensive. Replacing those batteries is expensive as a capital cost. You have to plan for it every four to five years, but it's the cost of doing business. The cost of not having a good reliable system in place is even higher when you have catastrophic failures. I would recommend the product, but you do have to be prepared to spend some money, both on the product as well as all the environmental preparations for powering the system and cooling system."
"I have mixed feelings about the pricing and licensing. I believe that when you sell a UPS, and considering the UPS is a lifeline to a lot of the major corporations, the monitoring solution should be part of the package automatically, out-the-door. If you have to raise that price on the UPS an extra $5,000, then do so at that moment. Don't have that as an extra offer after the UPS has been sold. I believe that all UPSs need to have high availability, all the latest software installed, and be ready to go out-the-door."
"For our used case, 12kW is good. It has worked very well for us. They can be a lot bigger and they can be smaller, but the 12kW seems to be just about right for us. It has a good price point."
"The UPSs are saving us approximately $50,000 a year."
"The pricing is far more competitive than APC or Liebert, the other two big players. And Eaton's service is phenomenal."
"The cost per unit, as a rough estimate, is $300,000 per UPS 750-block."
"It is not expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise9
No data available
 

Also Known As

Eaton Powerware, Powerware 9300 Series
Smart-UPS VT
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Gamatronic
The Boston Red Sox