NetApp StorageGRID vs Quantum ActiveScale comparison

NetApp and Quantum are both solutions in the File and Object Storage category. NetApp is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.0, while Quantum is ranked #24. NetApp holds a 5.9% mindshare in FaOS, compared to Quantum’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of NetApp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Quantum users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

NetApp StorageGRID and Quantum ActiveScale compete in the object storage solutions category. Quantum ActiveScale has the upper hand due to its advanced features, making it appealing despite its higher costs.

Features: NetApp StorageGRID focuses on robust data management, scalability, and pricing, appealing to enterprises seeking reliable solutions. Quantum ActiveScale provides advanced data protection, performance optimization, and superior security, making it preferred for data-intensive environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NetApp StorageGRID is known for its straightforward deployment and strong customer service, facilitating easier infrastructure integration. Quantum ActiveScale offers robust customer support but presents a more complex deployment process due to its advanced capabilities, potentially posing initial challenges.

Pricing and ROI: NetApp StorageGRID is recognized for competitive setup costs, offering better ROI for budget-conscious enterprises. Quantum ActiveScale requires a higher initial investment but justifies it with enhanced performance and features, appealing to organizations where advanced capabilities outweigh setup costs.

To learn more, read our detailed NetApp StorageGRID vs. Quantum ActiveScale Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

NetApp StorageGRID vs. Quantum ActiveScale

July 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

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the File and Object Storage category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 5.8%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp StorageGRID is 5.9%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quantum ActiveScale is 0.5%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

File and Object Storage

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

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Mir Gulzar Ahmed

IT Manager at Synergy Computers

Object-based storage and offers intuitive management tools, making it easy to configure and maintain

The only thing missing is flexibility in configuration to cater to specific customer requirements. Another area of improvement is marketing. NetApp's marketing of StorageGRID isn't optimal. They should present it more effectively, especially in regions like Pakistan. Here, I haven't seen any marketing campaigns from NetApp for StorageGRID or the Solid State Platform (SSP). While StorageGRID is a globally recognized product, I haven't seen any marketing efforts from NetApp in Pakistan. Even competitors are promoting object storage solutions here, but NetApp seems less efficient in selling StorageGRID. There might be one or two customers, but even as a NetApp partner, I'm not aware of any major sales. I've been trained on StorageGRID, and it is a good product. I'm unsure why it hasn't gained traction in Pakistan compared to other countries. So, I just recommend improving the marketing campaigns in Pakistan. I'm pretty confident that if we have one example of successful StorageGRID implementation in Pakistan, other customers will follow suit.

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Frank Lai

Architecture Department at Supermicro Computer

Good performance and reliable but the setup is complex

We would like to see a self-sufficient installation. Nowadays it's open-source, but the installation is still tied to the vendor, which means it is unlikely that it is going to scale. I want them to tap into the broader community. It is really emerging, they have a year over year, 50% annual growth. With a 10-year-old company, it will certainly bring a lot of interest, and will certainly make it more successful, if they tap into that growing customer base. They have to make themselves relevant to the industry. The industry is totally geared to the Cloud, DevOps, and geared for agility. The software with the appliance in my set is already outdated, and it is not that it cannot sell, but it has to be tapping into the emerging and growing sectors to continue with the customers and businesses. This is what the requirement is, to improve their technology. Which means that they have to make themselves relevant to the industry.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The main feature I have found to be product replication."

"FlashBlade offers low latency, high throughput, and seamless scalability."

"It performs well and it is also very fast."

"The performance of FlashBlade is excellent. It does not necessarily leverage the SOS API that some of the newer products leverage, but I found its speed pretty much on par and comparable. It is fast, and it does what it is supposed to do."

"What I like best about Pure Storage FlashBlade is its object storage functionality, plus it has fast underlying hardware. Pure Storage FlashBlade is also very stable. I find its stability one of its valuable features."

"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

"Among its most appealing features are its ease of handling and minimal maintenance requirements."

"The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The technical support is good."

"The speed of the disks removed the bottleneck from our storage."

"Cost-effective and easy to deploy."

"The scalability is very effective for our customers."

"Duplication, interface and the manageability is good and simple."

"It has awesome scalability. We consume it with storage appliance nodes, then we just plug and play as we need more."

"The implementation with NetApp went smoothly. It is a 'setup and forget' type of appliance."

More NetApp StorageGRID pros

"The technology is stable which is good."

"Workflow is easy to manage and maintain."

Cons

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

"I would like to see more deduplication."

"I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."

"The speed could be improved."

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"There is some room for new features related to authentication and integration with Kubernetes, and other solution using S3 Bucket."

"In the realm of micro-services, I think that Pure Storage can do well if they start getting in there and making their arrays more micro-services ready."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"We want to move towards Azure in the cloud. Right now, the system is all physical."

"The user interface of NetApp StorageGRID might need some tweaks, and configuration is maybe a little bit confusing for those who are not so experienced."

"They can enhance the deduplication and compression features, which are crucial for saving more disk space."

"I just recommend improving the marketing campaigns in Pakistan."

"The integration with more apps has room for improvement."

"I would like to see them integrate more with the monitoring platforms. It is a bit difficult to get automated monitoring of the system."

"Data retrieval speed could be better."

"The price is something that NetApp could improve, as with most companies. NetApp is known for not being the cheapest storage option, which is also valid for StorageGRID. There are other storage options on the market which we are aware of and have done proofs of concept for, but you cannot really compare the list prices because, as a big user of NetApp storages, we have totally different prices than some list prices. Still, the price information we got for other options are almost always less expensive than StorageGRID."

More NetApp StorageGRID cons

"We would like to see a self-sufficient installation."

"Lacks some ability to integrate with different systems."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"The price is a little high."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"The product is very expensive."

"It is within reason for what you get. From what we have found comparing it to other vendors, it is in the same range as others. Given the choice, we would definitely redeploy it based on the cost."

"I understand that it is competitively priced compared to other brands."

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"I rate the product pricing around five out of ten—it's negotiable, depending on the circumstances."

"We save money on storage costs from this solution since it allows us to have a source of revenue from customers consuming the service."

"It is very cost-effective."

"The pricing of StorageGRID falls within the typical range for enterprise-grade solutions and is comparable to other vendors such as Dell, NetApp, and Pure Storage."

"NetApp is not known for being the cheapest storage option on the market. Almost all of the other storage options we looked at were less expensive than StorageGRID. The price is one thing to criticize, which is what we hear internally and from customers as well. They find the cost of the terabytes in this class of storage a little bit higher than expected."

"Creating your own data stores, backups, or storage grids, helps eliminate all these costs of downloading all the data back after you downloaded to the cloud."

"The licensing that the S3 service provides them from a FabricPool standpoint is more attractive than the licensing from AWS or Azure."

"The price is attractive."

More NetApp StorageGRID pricing and cost advice

"Quantum ActiveScale is open-source."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

19%

Computer Software Company

14%

University

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

13%

University

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

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What do you like most about NetApp StorageGRID?

The management portals have most significantly improved our data retrieval times. They've made it much easier to rest...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NetApp StorageGRID?

It would definitely be more on the expensive side, especially if you compare it with open source solutions like Ceph.

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What needs improvement with NetApp StorageGRID?

If I could change anything in NetApp StorageGRID, that would be pricing. In terms of functionality, reliability, and ...

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Comparisons

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Compared 24% of the time

Dell ECS vs NetApp StorageGRID

Compared 22% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Cloudian HyperStore vs NetApp StorageGRID

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

August 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

NetApp StorageGRID

August 2025

Download NetApp StorageGRID product report

Buyer's Guide

File and Object Storage

August 2025

Download Quantum ActiveScale product report

Also Known As

No data available

Storage GRID

ActiveScale, Quantum ActiveScale Object Storage, ActiveScale Object Storage

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

Store and manage unstructured data at scale using NetApp StorageGRID for secure, durable object storage. Place content in the right location, at the right time, and on the right storage tier, optimizing workflows and reducing overall costs for globally distributed rich media.

NetApp

StorNext File System
Increase productivity and reduce time to critical business insights with StorNext® File System. StorNext architecture delivers the necessary performance to get your business moving forward.

Quantum

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

ASE, DARZ GmbH

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

NetApp StorageGRID vs. Quantum ActiveScale

July 2025

Free Report: NetApp StorageGRID vs. Quantum ActiveScale

Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp StorageGRID vs. Quantum ActiveScale and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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