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IBM Spectrum Protect vs NAKIVO Backup & Replication comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

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

IBM Spectrum Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
149
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NAKIVO Backup & Replication
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
6th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
88
Ranking in other categories
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NAKIVO Backup & Replication is 1.6%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Syed Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.
Mattia Sangiorgio - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhances data protection strategies and ensures the reliability of backups with helpful support
The features we have found most valuable in NAKIVO Backup & Replication include its cost-effectiveness, seamless integrations, comprehensive functionalities, and ease of installation and management. The pricing model is very competitive, providing excellent value for the robust features offered. Its seamless integration with our VMware infrastructure ensures smooth operation without any compatibility issues. The wide range of functionalities, including incremental and full backups, storage optimization, and disaster recovery options, meets all our backup needs comprehensively. Moreover, the simplicity of installation and the intuitive user interface have made it easy for our team to quickly set up and manage the backups without requiring extensive training.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It integrates well with Spectrum Scale."
"We are talking about a stable solution which boasts good performance and security."
"We are able to run it in an enterprise quite easily with one or two resources."
"The product helps us do data protection and restoration for disaster recovery (DR)."
"We can use it with any storage for the back-end to save data."
"Once setup, you do not need to touch it again. You just need to do a formal check on possibly batch updates."
"IBM Spectrum Protect offers stable software and products."
"The scheduled backups ensure we meet the requirements for our business, and we keep backups of certain environments."
"I could install and configure the trial version in maybe half an hour and had a successful backup of our file server on the same night."
"Nakivo has improved our organization largely due to the fact that it is an extremely robust backup system."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of creating a backup copy job to get the backups to a second device."
"Technical support responds very quickly."
"NAKIVO gives us the security to retain valuable data backups and recover them in case of emergency."
"We really appreciate the simplicity of the solution."
"The most important feature besides the easy management of the different backup jobs is the automated e-mail notification functionality."
"This is a user-friendly solution that has a lot of certifications and documentation for the Microsoft Hyper-V infrastructure."
 

Cons

"It is not easy to manage like other products in the market. It is okay only if you are command-line driven. Even though the operation center is there, it doesn't provide a single view of everything. You have to, for example, use TSMManager on top of it, which gives you a far better management capability, but it is a third-party product. Its management needs to be improved. There should be an HTML or graphical interface. It is a very difficult product. For example, you have a backup policy where you want a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly policy standard. It is an old kind of system where you have to keep retention for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups, which is very difficult in IBM Spectrum Protect. In other products, in a matter of five minutes, you can configure such a policy. In TSM, it takes you one, two, or three days because you need to configure a node for each of them. If you have 250 nodes, you have to configure each node for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly retention. If you have 1,000 nodes, it is going to take you ages just to configure and register the nodes. You need to configure the schedule and the CAD daemons or services, depending on whether it is a Unix or Windows OS. Unfortunately, it is a very long and drawn-out process. You have to stop and start the services for changes to take effect. This is a very difficult part of TSM in IBM Spectrum Protect. To configure a backup policy, I should be able to select the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly options in one screen and finish it. After that, everything should happen in the background. All the backup products in the market already do that, and they are very simple to manage. This particular part of this solution has really been a major pain area for us, and unfortunately, we could not find a workaround. There is nobody at IBM who can give us a way to configure all this easily through a GUI or even scripts."
"I want a better user interface, support, and integrations."
"They can include more cloud-enriching features. I would like IBM Spectrum Protect to have the functionality for backing up a VM directly in Azure. I would like to be able to back up a VM directly in Azure without spinning up a Hyper-V cluster and backing up the virtual server."
"We need everything cloud. Strong support for cloud services. S3 connectivity, which is mandatory for us in the future along with this integration of Spectrum Copy Data Management or Spectrum Protect services together with these Spectrum Protect Plus functionalities, e.g., hardware, snapshots, and Copy Data Management. They should come together in one solution."
"A lot of my customers always ask for legal holds, especially on email."
"We recently had a situation where we quickly got code, and the number of tapes exceeded the library capacity so we were waiting a while to change. We got a fix for this right away."
"It seems like they are a little behind on the integration to Azure Cloud as well as Amazon."
"It doesn't integrate with storage pools, with a normal pool. I'd like to see that."
"Updating VM Tools on a replicated VM could be better."
"I would like to have the option of creating a subfolder per job in the backup repository because we had an issue where some files were corrupted and we lost the backup of the majority of the VMs."
"In the future, I would like to see support for backing up data to more cloud platforms, besides Amazon."
"In the loading of a backup, choosing what to restore seems to be a lengthy process, but it has always worked in my restore tests."
"In terms of what could be improved for the next release, I would probably answer better documentation and licensing models."
"The only thing I could say is maybe some more options for job scheduling are needed."
"The process for getting unused diskspace back from the data repository is slow."
"They had given a feature of real-time replication which they stopped in NAKIVO. When we wanted to sell, they backed out, and currently, it is not available across platforms."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is low cost. It is very cool when we design it to using licensing based on post capacity."
"The licensing fees are on a yearly basis, which for us it is about R400,000 (approximately $27,000 USD)."
"When compared to the cost of other enterprise products, it seems to be in the same range. However, compared to the cost of non-enterprise products, it is really high."
"It can be perceived as expensive since it is designed for enterprise use."
"Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less."
"IBM provides an open license policy, which is more like a gentlemen's agreement."
"Customers need to pay for licensing in order to use IBM Spectrum Protect. The customers that have been using it for a long time are okay and happy with it. From a cost point of view, it's better for them to renew their licenses than to go through the difficult process of changing a backup product in their environment, and migrate from one product to another."
"Its licensing is complex, and its price is not really reasonable. It is on the expensive side. IBM, in general, is slightly expensive, but with IBM Spectrum for the virtual environment, they are looking into the aspect of helping customers with the cost and providing a cost-effective solution."
"It has a much higher bang for the buck than other products we evaluated."
"You have a lot of different options when it comes to pricing and the pricing models are pretty flexible and affordable."
"The solution's pricing is adequate for its features and quality."
"It's really cheap, and our company saves a significant amount of money on IT backup solutions per year."
"The licensing model is crystal clear on the website."
"The price is not a problem in NAKIVO, as it is the most competitive in the market."
"We use a perpetual license that is priced well."
"This product provides good value for the price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
9%
University
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dash...
How does Nakivo compare with Veeam Backup & Replication?
Nakivo is my favorite backup software. Below are the main benefits of Nakivo compared to Veeam 1. Low cost. 2. Backup storage with global deduplication (this is the main requirement of a backup sol...
What do you like most about Nakivo?
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is very easy to use.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nakivo?
The product is affordable even for smaller organizations.
 

Also Known As

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology
Coca Cola, Honda, 3M, University of Arizona, University of Maryland, University of Arkansas, Johns Hopkins University, Marriott, Radisson Hotels and Resorts, Fujifilm, Eiffage
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Protect vs. NAKIVO Backup & Replication and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.