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IBM Spectrum Protect vs Veritas NetBackup 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
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
149
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Veritas NetBackup
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
116
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 Veritas NetBackup is 3.4%, down from 5.2% 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.
Wesam Qashou - PeerSpot reviewer
A mature backup solution, with many features, and great support
Veritas NetBackup is the first line of defense when disaster strikes. Before performing disaster recovery, we must have a good backup of our image that is also protected from ransomware. This way, we have a golden image that is resilient to ransomware attacks. We saw the benefits of Veritas NetBackup within the first three months.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution can back up every kind of workload in the environment."
"It is pretty scalable. It will scale to anything."
"We have a very good team of administrators who know the product perfectly and are able to manage it on a day-to-day basis."
"Forever incremental - allows TSM to optimize storage needs."
"It is scalable beyond anything my customers ever aspire to."
"You can protect your data and keep it for long durations, without it spending too much time on the local disk."
"Its incremental forever approach is valuable, so we don't have to load tapes to do a restore."
"The file-restoring feature is the most valuable."
"Veritas NetBackup is a reliable, easy-to-use, and easy-to-deploy solution."
"Logs are very easy to read, parse, and use for diagnostics."
"Ease of installing, configuring, upgrading, and troubleshooting."
"What I like most is it is a professional product. It supports all kinds of technologies, and I consider it one of the best backup products available."
"Veritas released a new feature in version 8 of NetBackup called VRP. It's kind of like replication management from VMware. The great thing about this feature is that Veritas gave it to us for free."
"The product is stable and reliable."
"The most valuable feature is that you don't need any special connectivity - you just need to give your seller name, and then it automatically discovers all your virtual machines, which is a great benefit, especially in a bigger environment."
"The Replication Director, Auto Image Replication, Accelerator, Oracle Intelligent Policy, synthetic and VADP backups are the most valuable features."
 

Cons

"They took some of the funding off of it for a while. Therefore, instead of being a market leader, they took their position for granted. Then some competitors developed new bells and whistles that they advertise, and due to that lag a few years ago, there are not the resources to explain the differences."
"High availability (HA) is a scalability challenge."
"Customers have migrated off of it because of its lack of virtual environment functions."
"We would like to see cloud integration."
"Stability is very good now. It used to be rocky years ago."
"I would love to see something which allows us to do an auto restart of backup jobs."
"The stability could be improved."
"It could use single store. The ability to mark an archive from my backup for long-term retention."
"Some of the hardware is out of support."
"The HTML interface is a web application that does not offer all the features."
"We want a solution that can be scaled-out because our data is growing very quickly, and we aren't able to back it up quickly. It takes one or two days, which is a problem. It is very slow. We just use one backup server. We want another solution with maybe a backup server cluster to back up more data in one day. We want a solution that can be scaled-out to back up our data quickly and efficiently."
"Veritas NetBackup has some limitations and it would be a benefit if we had better documentation."
"Veritas could simplify the firmware recovery in terms of the deployed. The process shouldn't be dependent on the agents. It should be completely agentless."
"There could be granular control over metadata components, specifically in the context of JSON data for the product."
"Extra features come with additional costs."
"The pricing is a bit of a concern. If could be lower."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"License-wise regarding IBM, it's licensed per terabyte. And that is after compression and deduplication."
"Its licensing is complicated. It goes by CPUs, and it is pretty expensive as well."
"Licensing IBM Spectrum Protect can be somewhat confusing for new users due to the options available, such as licensing on a capacity or per server basis."
"The licensing fees are between $8,000 and $10,000 per year."
"Some of the new advanced features are definitely more into cost savings, e.g., dedupe compression, so doing more with less."
"We have capacity licensing. We use the front end. The capacity licensing is pretty okay on the licensing price. I used to use the old PVU-based licensing in the early environment, but now we use capacity-based licensing."
"The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive and there is only a standard licensing fee."
"It is very expensive. The licensing cost for this solution is on a yearly basis. It is approximately 50k. We will continue using it at least for the next year, but we are currently doing an analysis to switch to some other solution."
"When we consider the quality and value of Veritas NetBackup, it is worth the cost."
"It is reasonably priced."
"The price of Veritas NetBackup is high, it should be reduced."
"The solution is expensive compared to other products."
"Veritas NetBackup's pricing is a bit steep when compared to other tools. It is very costly, but service-wise and overall, the Veritas NetBackup is a good product."
"If you have a complex environment with dozens of different servers and apps, I recommend you look for TB licensing."
"The solution is expensive compared to other alternatives."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is the best next generation backup tool?
Assuming you have an onprem ecosystem which runs the VMware, physical systems on Win, Linux and Unix and run both traditional DB's and nosql DB's like mongo, then Netbackup (NBU) will be the right ...
What do you like most about Veritas NetBackup?
The most valuable feature of cloud integration is the ability to send data outside of your location. This can be achieved by integrating cloud tier options or other object storage solutions.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Veritas NetBackup?
The product is cost-effective, and I would rate its pricing as an eight out of ten. The pricing model is based on the amount of data transferred, making it manageable for us.
 

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
Beta Offshore
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Veritas NetBackup and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,390 professionals have used our research since 2012.