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HPE Zerto Software vs Oracle Data Guard comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 11, 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

HPE Zerto Software
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
309
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (2nd)
Oracle Data Guard
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
16th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of HPE Zerto Software is 3.1%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle Data Guard is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Sachin Vinay - PeerSpot reviewer
Leverage disaster recovery with reliable support and cost-effective future-proof features
Zerto is straightforward to implement because it only requires the installation of an agent on the VMs designated for migration. A service, typically a VM, must also be deployed at the disaster recovery location. This entire process is simple and can be completed within three days. Zerto's near-synchronous replication occurs every minute, allowing for highly granular recovery points. This means that even if interruptions or malware disruptions occur within that minute, Zerto can restore to the last known good state, effectively recovering the entire setup to the latest backup. This capability ensures high data security and minimizes potential data loss. One of the main benefits of implementing Zerto is its data compression, which significantly reduces the load on our IPsec VPN. Zerto compresses data by 80 percent before transmitting it across the VPN, minimizing the data transferred between geographically dispersed locations. This compression and subsequent decompression at the destination alleviate the strain on the VPN, preventing overload and ensuring efficient data synchronization. Zerto simplifies malware protection by integrating it into its disaster recovery and synchronization features. This comprehensive approach eliminates the need for separate antivirus setups in virtual machines and applications. It streamlines our security measures and removes the need for additional software or solutions, resulting in an excellent return on investment. Zerto's single-click recovery solution offers exceptional recovery speed. Through the user interface, a single click allows for a complete restoration from the most recent backup within two to three minutes, enabling rapid recovery and minimal downtime. Zerto's Recovery Time Objective is excellent. In the past, if a virtual machine crashed, we would recover it from a snapshot, which could take one to two hours. With Zerto, the recovery process takes only five minutes, and users are typically unaware of any disruption. This allows us to restore everything quickly and efficiently. Zerto has significantly reduced our downtime. When malware affects our data, Zerto immediately notifies us and helps us protect other applications, even those not yet implemented with Zerto. By monitoring these applications, we can quickly identify and address any potential malware spread, minimizing downtime across our systems. Zerto significantly reduces downtime and associated costs during disruptions. Our services are unified, so in the event of a disruption without Zerto, even a half-day disruption would necessitate offline procedures. This would lead to increased manpower, service delays, and substantial financial losses due to interrupted admissions and other critical processes. By unifying service processes, Zerto minimizes the impact of outages. Zerto streamlines our disaster recovery testing across multiple locations by enabling efficient failover testing without disrupting live services. Traditionally, DR testing required downtime of critical systems, but Zerto's replication and failover capabilities allow us to test in parallel with live operations. This non-disruptive approach ensures continuous service availability while validating our DR plan, even in scenarios like malware attacks, by creating a separate testing environment that mirrors the live setup. This comprehensive testing provides confidence in our ability to handle real-world incidents effectively. This saves us over 60 percent of the time. Zerto streamlines system administration tasks by automating many processes, thereby reducing the workload for multiple administrators. This allows them to focus on other university services that require attention and effectively reallocate support resources from automated tasks to those requiring more dedicated management. Zerto is used exclusively for our critical services, providing up to a 70 percent improvement in our IT resilience.
Azhagupandi Parthiban - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers near-real-time replication for data consistency and continuously introducing new features through upgrades
There are various advantages. First of all, easy to deploy. The only difficult part is the cost factor, licensing. In other ways, the implementation is very, very important. Like, we have not encountered any major challenges with replication. We were able to achieve near-real-time replication. Also, with the switchover failover, we were not getting any technical issues. It's a pretty stable product. Once you configure it, it goes through the rollback, and then Data Guard introduces this snapshot thing. So once the restoration happens, we can go back to the original thing, and we make that a standard. It's a pretty decent and key function for Oracle. So, enterprise organizations go for Oracle only for features like these.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What I appreciate about Zerto is that it's set and forget. You set it, and it just works."
"Zerto offered a very good front-end GUI for orchestration. The graphic interface was very good."
"Speed of recovery has been very effective in getting our information back as fast as we're able to get it. The daily backup solution that we use alternatively only allows a single backup versus having continuous backup replication with Zerto, it's a no-brainer."
"The recovery was pretty seamless. It took about a minute for it to kick over when we did our testing. So, it wasn't a long downtime."
"VMware VM replication over narrow WAN bandwidth."
"It helps us keep our required retention period for specific documents and allows us to recover older documents if we have to compare and recreate those."
"With Zerto, all you have to do is deploy the executable and start setting things up. So, it was very easy."
"The live failover tests and point-in-time recovery options have been exceptionally valuable features of Zerto for our organization."
"It's a very good solution if you want to protect your data across two data centers, or you have a middle man or many administrators who use these solutions for protecting their data. It's very reliable compared to other solutions that are most often not storage-based."
"You can see how the logs are applied, check the apply time, and how far behind the standby is at any given time."
"The solution has been stable so far."
"Technical support is very good. If at any time we write a ticket, we get the appropriate answer on time."
"The most valuable features are the backup and restore. With this in place along with the clustering, the database is safe from hacking, hardware failure, power failures, and system crashes."
"With Data Guard, Oracle guarantees zero data loss, providing peace of mind for organizations relying on their data for critical operations."
"The most valuable aspect for me is undoubtedly the failover capability and the assurance of data safety provided by Oracle Data Guard."
"We have not encountered any major challenges with replication. We were able to achieve near-real-time replication. Also, with the switchover failover, we were not getting any technical issues. It's a pretty stable product."
 

Cons

"The overall management plan could improve. If something happens with the VM on the vSphere side, the error codes are pretty weak. If there was a way to click on something within the UI that takes us to a support page or article, that would be very beneficial."
"The problem with the backup product is that it's not very mature and you really need a specific use case to be able to use it effectively. It's hard to explain to our customers, especially our large customers, that the use case is so limited."
"One thing I would like to see, and I know that this is on their roadmap, is the ability to use long-term storage in the cloud, like in Azure or AWS, making that even more seamless. Whether it's stored in glacier or on-prem, being able to retrieve that data in a quick manner would be helpful. They're just not there yet."
"Zerto could improve its pricing and customer care. I've never used customer care, but I talked to someone who had, and they weren't given the information they needed."
"We do have some sites that are very low-bandwidth sites. Zerto is able to set throttling in the solution, but the throttling is set at a site-wide level. In those instances that have very low bandwidth, I can't reduce the throttling on that site. It would be nice if there were a way to control the throttling by the protection group for a specific workload."
"Customer service and technical support need improvement."
"The only issue I've ever had is that I wish that Zerto would work more closely with VMware. There have been a few times that Zerto has released an update but it wasn't supported with that version of VMware. I would like them to coordinate their updates with VMware's updates."
"The alerting doesn't quite give you the information about what exactly is going on when an issue comes up. We do get alerts inside of our vCenter, but it doesn't quite give you accurate information inside the plugin to be able to tell us what's going on without having to go into the actual Zerto application and figuring out what's causing the issue."
"For every standby server you have, you must pay a licensing fee, which is the main disadvantage."
"The IP implementation and maintenance are a little bit hard to manage across Oracle solutions, including Oracle Data Guard."
"One thing that can be improved is the GUI. It would be good to have a very nice GUI to easily configure and administer, providing different presentations to the database administrator. The feature that can be included is the integration with third-party monitoring systems, that is, monitoring systems from other vendors, not only from Oracle."
"The predominant issue lies in the communication link between the secondary and primary databases."
"The deployment cost is expensive."
"The implementation is complex for anyone who's jumping into it without any experience. It's all command-line driven implementations. For some, that's a turn-off."
"Oracle Data Guard is stable, but you need to keep monitoring the system all the time. You need to keep monitoring the archives."
"The usage of block storage devices in the cloud or migration of a type of storage from one site to another site can be improved. Currently, we have to use multi-node to single node because of the lack of storage support on the Azure side. It did not really work. Our DBA had to spend a lot of time tweaking the Data Guard tools, or the underlying Oracle VMs, to make sure that Data Guard would run on top of different types of storage. So, if it can support transporting or getting from one type of storage to another type of storage in a different site or a different technology, it would be very helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I know it is per server, but I am not fully aware of the price model. I know for our VDI environment, they are looking at something that is on the lower end and that they can use just for migrations and not so much a disaster recovery."
"The solution is expensive, but it's worth the price."
"The pricing for this solution is reasonable."
"Its licensing is yearly. You can do multi-year contracts, which is what we did. You pay per VM, and you replicate a license per VM. So, we bought about 20 licenses. We paid somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000. There is an initial upfront cost. Basically, you buy the license, and then you have a maintenance cost on top of that. So, the upfront cost is somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000. The maintenance is $5,000 to $10,000 over a three-year period."
"Zerto is pretty reasonable. I haven't checked to see how much Rubrik is going to quote us for their solution. At least for us, the price doesn't play a big factor in the decision-making because it is a pretty small deployment for our use case."
"Zerto is a little expensive."
"Its price can be better, but it is not bad. Most small-scale organizations can afford it, but they can come up with more customer-friendly packages."
"Zerto is definitely more costly compared to its competitors, such as VMware Site Recovery Manager. It may not be suitable for small and medium-sized industries."
"The pricing is on the higher side."
"It's a cost-effective solution."
"If you want to have everything automated and done smoothly, you have to add additional licenses."
"The licensing cost is significantly high."
"The cost is expensive."
"It is not a cheap product, but if you look at the price, features, availability, scalability, and maturity, it is a very good product."
"​Oracle Data Guard is a feature available only in Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, and is available for extra cost."
"This is the best solution if you want something similar that's less expensive than Oracle Grid."
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Comparison Review

it_user159711 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 9, 2014
VMware SRM vs. Veeam vs. Zerto
Disaster recovery planning is something that seems challenging for all businesses. Virtualization in addition to its operational flexibility, and cost reduction benefits, has helped companies improve their DR posture. Virtualization has made it easier to move machines from production to…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?
Ik fluister:VM Host Oracle en DataGuard hebben we per toeval vervangen door Zerto :-) tijdens de Zerto implementatie en VPG werden de Host Data in write-ack Block-Level gerepliceerd. Qua licentie 1...
What do you like most about Zerto?
Its ability to roll back if the VM or the server that you are recovering does not come up right is also valuable. You have the ability to roll back a few seconds or a few minutes. The rollback feat...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zerto?
I ballpark Zerto's pricing at about $1,000 per VM, which I find fair for what it does, but the cost of entry was tough initially due to the minimum number needed to start. I really needed to prove ...
What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?
It is a very useful administrative IT tool. It saves on costs. I strongly recommend Data Guard. I've been using it for eight years and I would strongly recommend it. I'd rate Oracle Data Guard a se...
What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?
We're Oracle partners. We've worked with databases 11G and 12C. If a company is planning to implement Oracle solutions, I would suggest they also implement Data Guard. I'd rate the solution nine ou...
What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?
This solution is for small to medium-sized businesses, who can't afford to have two data centers or two servers. Oracle Data Guard has many features to ensure that the database is in place. In case...
 

Also Known As

Zerto Virtual Replication
Active Data Guard
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
Athenahealth, Discover Financial Services
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Zerto Software vs. Oracle Data Guard and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,856 professionals have used our research since 2012.