IBM Spectrum Protect vs Quest Rapid Recovery comparison

IBM and Quest Software are both solutions in the Backup and Recovery category. IBM is ranked #14 with an average rating of 7.3, while Quest Software is ranked #37 with an average rating of 8.5. IBM holds a 2.2% mindshare in BRS, compared to Quest Software’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Quest Software users who would recommend it.

IBM Spectrum Protect

Read 149 IBM Spectrum Protect reviews

3,421 Views
2,509 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Quest Rapid Recovery

Read 20 Quest Rapid Recovery reviews

1,106 Views
516 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Protect

Quest Rapid Recovery

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

IBM Spectrum Protect and Quest Rapid Recovery are both prominent data protection solutions. Users report higher satisfaction with the pricing and support of IBM Spectrum Protect, while Quest Rapid Recovery is preferred for its range of features.

Features: IBM Spectrum Protect is valued for its comprehensive backup and restore capabilities, scalability, and seamless integration with various platforms. Quest Rapid Recovery stands out for its fast recovery times, image-based backup, and ease of use. Users find Quest Rapid Recovery's features more efficient for certain applications, making it the preferred choice.

Room for Improvement: Users suggest IBM Spectrum Protect could benefit from an improved reporting system and more intuitive configuration processes. For Quest Rapid Recovery, users highlight the need for enhanced documentation and better support for newer technologies. The differences show IBM Spectrum Protect requires a better user experience, whereas Quest Rapid Recovery needs updated tech support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Deployment for IBM Spectrum Protect is often described as complex, demanding significant customization and expertise. Its customer service receives mixed reviews. Quest Rapid Recovery is praised for easier deployment and a more straightforward setup process, though its customer support also garners varied feedback. Quest Rapid Recovery has the edge in deployment simplicity.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Protect is known for higher initial setup costs but provides substantial ROI through robust long-term performance. Quest Rapid Recovery features a more competitive pricing model with quicker ROI due to lower setup expenses and operational efficiency. For cost-sensitive users, Quest Rapid Recovery's pricing and ROI are more attractive.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Quest Rapid Recovery Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Quest Rapid Recovery

June 2025

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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

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

149

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Quest Rapid Recovery

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

37th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

5.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quest Rapid Recovery is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

Syed Habib

Head of Infrastructure Security (S.A.V.P) at EXIM Bank Ltd

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.

Read full review

Adam Augustín

Country Manager at Prianto Ltd

Granular recovery, replication is good and offers good speed

It is for any kind of company that uses their own servers. From a global perspective, our clients are small-sized companies. All the SMEs, compared to the Slovakian market, are quite small. It's a small market with small companies. They just want to enhance security and follow regulations It's…

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The feature we have found most valuable is when you want to integrate it with a Tape Library and then do the DRM life cycle. That is when it works the best."

"We have better, faster backup times, and it has improved efficiency in the backups."

"We do not lose data. That is why we are using this product and have a backup in place."

"It is a very mature product."

"by backing up only the changed data, we average around 75TB per night. If we had to do full backups, even occasionally, we would not be able to complete the backup within 12 hours, or we would have to make a large investment to fit a full backup within the 12 hour window."

"The scheduled backups ensure we meet the requirements for our business, and we keep backups of certain environments."

"The main feature of this product is a flexible architecture and functionality that allows you to solve problems of any complexity and scale. Most importantly, it is not just a product that simply makes a backup, but it restores and saves a large number of services in critical situations. By the way, it works fine with different types of clouds, supports S3."

"Replication processes with container storage pools allow reduction of storage space and network bandwidth, using deduplication and compression."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pros

"The fact that it can take a snapshot of everything on a server and replicate it on another server in real-time is the most valuable feature."

"The local mount utility is most valuable. I do restores fairly regularly. Thankfully, I have not ever lost an entire server that I've had to resurrect, but I certainly have people who erroneously saved over a file or have deleted a file. So, we've done that quite a bit. We still have the DL4000 appliance, and we had, kind of, extrapolated that out over a five-year period. Now, we're in year six, so we had to add storage, which we did as a SAN next to DL4000, but prior to adding in that extra storage, we, here and there, would run into situations where for whatever reason, it would want to be pulling a new base image, and then we would run out of storage. So, we would utilize the archive feature and archive the old data that we want to hang on to, but we don't necessarily need it taking up current data storage. Being able to export out really old data is most valuable to us. Then, we just store that on a NAS that we keep in another building."

"Built-in encryption helps to secure our data as it travels from our on-site server to our off-site backup server."

"The most valuable feature of Quest Rapid Recovery for our organization is the VM recovery functionality."

"The solution offers a 100% guarantee that if it's backed up you will be able to restore it onto any platform you want."

"The best feature of the solution is the user interface."

"Probably the point-in-time recovery is most valuable. The other piece that is really nice is that you can mount a whole server at any point in time. So, you can mount the server with all the drives to a Z drive or something like that. It will just mount it all up, and your data is accessible right there on one drive, which is nice."

"The solution's most valuable aspect is its ability to back up a physical server to another physical or virtual server."

More Quest Rapid Recovery pros

Cons

"IBM Spectrum Protect is not a very user-friendly tool."

"I would like to see more technical training online. Sometimes, it is a little bit difficult to find, or that I do not really know what I am looking for as somebody who is starting off finding their learning curve."

"The administration interface should implement more functionalities that exist only in the command line and needs improvement in how some reports are created."

"This product comes up against other products available that are marketed better but the other products that it's in competition with are a single product and this is one of IBM products. If it could be marketed as more for competitors I think that's where it comes short."

"The initial setup is complex."

"I am looking forward to new features in the next release. One of the main features is the cloud storage integration, which was one of my main required features. I've had more difficult experiences with other platforms than with this one."

"Restoring massive files is a very time-consuming process."

"Customers have migrated off of it because of its lack of virtual environment functions."

More IBM Spectrum Protect cons

"In case, if there is anything, it would be the speed of the operation to be finished. Even then, I can easily work on the storing function before the operation is finished."

"It's buggy. That's a big problem. We're arranging to get rid of it. We're going to switch to Veeam."

"One area where Quest Rapid Recovery has room for improvement is in the handling of snapshots on Hyper-V."

"You can only take a snapshot from a virtual environment. It should have the ability to take snapshots from both a virtual and physical environment."

"I think the self-paced learning and knowledge base can always be improved so that users can self-service without having to contact either a reseller or Quest. I know there are things that I would have been looking for to try and solve. And the only way I could get there was to actually open a ticket rather than go through self-service through the portal."

"In terms of what needs improvement in Quest Rapid Recovery, though the solution is seamless, right now, they are just giving the software which means we'll need to arrange the hardware. If they can combine the appliance and software, that would be a great approach. In the next release of Quest Rapid Recovery, it would be great if they'd add a folder backup feature because only a snapshot backup feature is available at the moment."

"It's not really Quest's fault, but the only issue that I had during the time when I was doing a lot of our restores is whenever the server reboots, it has to bring all of the repositories back in again, which takes around five to six hours to pull eight terabytes back in again."

"The on-premises deployment model shouldn't have a maintenance fee. If there's going to be technical support, they need it to be free or it should be paid on upon adopting the solution."

More Quest Rapid Recovery cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing fees are between $8,000 and $10,000 per year."

"Its licensing is complicated. It goes by CPUs, and it is pretty expensive as well."

"The licensing is varied. If we have small environments (not many TB being managed) it is best to license by PVUs (depending on the number of cores of the machine). If we manage many TBs we look at licensing by capacity which allows us to use all the agents of the product."

"We are paying for support and maintenance on a monthly basis."

"It can be perceived as expensive since it is designed for enterprise use."

"The pricing of the solution is high in comparison to other products on the market. For example, IBM and Symantec have less costly options."

"The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive. However, there are a few packages and it is unclear because, for the entry suite they have both options, which are the back-end storage capacity and the front-end storage capacity."

"Technical support is pretty good. It is doing fine, but you pay for it."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pricing and cost advice

"It's very expensive which is why I want to drop it. They charge us per core and we have a six-core server. It's expensive to pay for maintenance charges. I want to switch to something cheaper."

"It is a little expensive. However, I haven't compared it to other solutions. Being a nonprofit, it is always good to have nonprofit discounts on products."

"Its price is okay. It is reasonable in terms of the way it works."

"Licensing fees are based on the amount of data that you want to store, which is related to how many customers you want to cover."

"I'm not aware of the exact cost of Quest Rapid Recovery because I'm from the technical team, but in general, the solution is quite competitive cost-wise."

"I don't think the licensing for the product is very expensive."

"I believe the basic license comes with six terabytes, whereas a lot of the other ones are four terabytes. From the price point, it seemed a lot better than the comparative models, such as Datto, Barracuda, and some of the others. I believe Barracuda was about $15,000 for four terabytes, and Quest was around $12,000 for six terabytes. Pricing is based on the period. There is just the maintenance fee that you have to pay annually, or you can pay for a three-year or four-year contract. This includes Premier Support."

"When I purchased the change to the license, it was $1,600. I think that was for changing the license. I don't believe that I had to purchase technical support in a while, so I must've bought maybe for five years, but I don't feel there was a huge cost involved in technical support. Its cost was definitely worth it because we've had a fantastic experience with them."

More Quest Rapid Recovery pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Real Estate/Law Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Spectrum Protect?

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Protect?

It's expensive. I acknowledge the cost associated with it.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?

One point for improvement for IBM Spectrum Protect is security, as IBM has not been investing as much as in the past. There is a need for additional layers of security to fill the gaps, which is wh...

See all answers

What do you like most about Quest Rapid Recovery?

The most valuable feature of Quest Rapid Recovery for our organization is the VM recovery functionality.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Quest Rapid Recovery?

Dell solutions are approximately 30% to 35% more expensive than Veeam.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Quest Rapid Recovery?

The product is expensive.

See all answers

Comparisons

Veeam Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 15% of the time

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 15% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 12% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 10% of the time

IBM Storage Protect vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Protect Competitors

Veeam Data Platform vs Quest Rapid Recovery

Compared 39% of the time

Quest NetVault Plus vs Quest Rapid Recovery

Compared 13% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Quest Rapid Recovery

Compared 8% of the time

Rubrik vs Quest Rapid Recovery

Compared 8% of the time

HPE Zerto Software vs Quest Rapid Recovery

Compared 7% of the time

More Quest Rapid Recovery Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Protect

June 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Protect product report

Buyer's Guide

Quest Rapid Recovery

June 2025

Download Quest Rapid Recovery product report

Also Known As

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Dell AppAssure

Overview

IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) family. It enables reliable, cost effective backups and fast recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.

IBM

Quest Rapid Recovery is a software solution that helps you recover your lost or deleted data quickly and easily. It works by scanning your hard drive for any traces of lost or deleted files, and then recovering them for you. You can use Quest Rapid Recovery to recover files from any type of storage device, including your computer's hard drive, an external hard drive, a USB flash drive, or even a memory card.

Quest Rapid Recovery is easy to use and comes with a user-friendly interface. It also has a wide range of features that make it one of the most powerful data recovery tools available on the market today. Whether you need to recover a single file or your entire system, Quest Rapid Recovery is flexible enough to get the job done.

The software offers simple solutions for backup and restoration. You can monitor and manage backup and recovery environments across multiple sites from one cloud-based management console. The software also tracks changed blocks to speed up backups and reduce storage usage. In addition, Quest Rapid Recovery deploys application-consistent backup with fast recovery for file servers and applications on both Microsoft Windows and Linux systems.

Quest Rapid Recovery Features

Cloud archive: Stores your static data in Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3, Rackspace, or any OpenStack provider. This gives you more options for recovering your data. You can directly mount the archives to do a bare metal restore or a file-level restore.
Rapid snap for applications: Incremental-forever snapshots can be used to capture an entire application and its relevant state every 5 minutes, so that the application can be recovered quickly with near-zero downtime and minimal data loss.
Rapid snap for virtual: Protect your growing virtual environment by protecting VMware and Hyper-V VMs without disrupting applications and users.
Live recovery: Restores operations rapidly with an RTO of minutes.
Virtual standby: If the primary machine has any problems, the virtual machine will be activated to take its place.

Quest Rapid Recovery Benefits

Offers the ability to easily back up data in the data center and in the cloud.
Allows users to return to work quickly and without any impact on their business.
Ensures you set recovery point objectives that are specific in order to reduce the risk of data loss.
Reduces the amount of storage space you need to back up your files and save money on backup costs.
Uses the cloud to back up, archive, and store your data in case of a disaster.
Functions as a single solution for both physical and virtual environments.

Reviews from Real Users

Quest Rapid Recovery stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its ability to greatly reduce backup and recovery time and its ability to mount an entire server.

PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews. Glenn R., an ICT network manager at St Christopher's School Hove, writes, “We have reduced our backup and recovery time by between 80% and 90%. Built-in encryption helps to secure our data as it travels from our on-site server to our off-site backup server.”

Bill V., a systems and network administrator at a tech services company, notes, “Probably the point-in-time recovery is most valuable. The other piece that is really nice is that you can mount a whole server at any point in time. So, you can mount the server with all the drives to a Z drive or something like that. It will just mount it all up, and your data is accessible right there on one drive, which is nice."

Quest Software

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

PRIME aerostructures GmbH, Tamworth Regional Council, Rhondda Housing Association, Stadtwerke Pforzheim GmbH & Co., Guangdong Aiyingdao Childrens Department Store, Nspyre, Tarrant Technology Partners, CloudRunner

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Quest Rapid Recovery

June 2025

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