Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Panzura CloudFS vs StarWind Storage Appliance comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 18, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
5.1
Organizations experienced enhanced resilience, doubled performance, and productivity gains by adopting Panzura CloudFS, solving past file storage issues.
Sentiment score
6.0
StarWind Storage Appliance users saw reduced costs, improved performance, and increased efficiency, with easy scalability and high reliability.
Previously, we had latency issues with syncing up files between offices. Files were not locked, leading to overwrites which cost us literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost time and revenue.
We saw the benefits of Panzura CloudFS immediately because our remote offices were able to share files immediately after the product went live.
Panzura CloudFS saves us a significant amount of time frequently.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Panzura CloudFS support is praised for quick, expert assistance despite occasional delays, receiving high ratings from users.
Sentiment score
9.0
StarWind Storage Appliance customer service is praised for 24x7 troubleshooting, professionalism, high technical support ratings, and helpful videos.
The support staff and the number of people they have on staff right now are truly good.
When we have a priority-one issue, we typically receive a call within 20 to 30 minutes.
I would give the support for Panzura CloudFS a ten out of ten because they are responsive and helpful.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.8
Panzura CloudFS is highly scalable, effortlessly supports many users across locations, with seamless deployment and dedicated support.
Sentiment score
7.5
StarWind Storage Appliance is scalable, adaptable, hardware-independent, supports unlimited storage, and is effective in standalone and hyperconverged environments.
Unlimited users can access the system without issues.
From our original entry with Panzura CloudFS, we have added an additional seven sites, and deploying those additional nodes was very seamless and did not take any effort.
The latest version, 8.0.2, has better ease of decommissioning filers and bringing new ones online.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.1
Panzura CloudFS is highly stable with rare outages and improved reliability, earning high user ratings overall.
Sentiment score
8.9
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for stability, robust performance, and high user ratings, especially on well-maintained Windows OS.
I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.
We have never had their system crash on us.
There were times with file lock issues between filers, causing various anomalies, but with their ongoing development, these issues have improved.
 

Room For Improvement

Panzura CloudFS needs improvements in performance, compatibility, pricing, dashboard, alerting, licensing, Active Directory reliance, NFS service, and support.
StarWind Storage Appliance requires improved integration, easier setup, better insights, and feature parity between demo and paid versions.
When something goes wrong somewhere, there should be a little bit better alerting with issues before they become a big problem.
The GIS data formats, such as a geo database, have been found better kept outside of Panzura CloudFS.
It would have been nice if they had offered them in increments, of 5, 10, 15, or 20 terabytes than having to get a whole chunk of 25 terabytes again for licensing purposes, which is a little costly.
 

Setup Cost

Panzura CloudFS pricing is higher than competitors, lacks granular licenses, but offers negotiation flexibility and transparency.
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its affordability, straightforward licensing, and excellent value compared to competitors for SMEs.
It did require us to purchase new hardware, however, that was not overly expensive.
They should consider more attractive pricing for companies of our size.
Overall, it is quite costly compared to NetApp and similar solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Panzura CloudFS enhances workflows with high availability, security, and seamless collaboration, reducing storage costs and boosting productivity.
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its user-friendly interface, high performance, reliability, excellent support, affordability, and robust data protection.
It is very reliable and very quick.
It helps us increase network resilience. We have a primary object library stored in the cloud and have Panzura Mirroring which allows us to place data in a secondary cloud for added resiliency.
There is no degradation of speed because these filers have cached the data, and they are constantly swapping metadata and updating with each other, which is a very attractive method of getting us to use these applications.
 

Categories and Ranking

Panzura CloudFS
Ranking in NAS
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (2nd), Cloud Storage (6th), Cloud Storage Gateways (1st)
StarWind Storage Appliance
Ranking in NAS
16th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (30th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the NAS category, the mindshare of Panzura CloudFS is 3.0%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Storage Appliance is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
NAS
 

Featured Reviews

Roger Clark - PeerSpot reviewer
Handles file locks effectively enabling seamless remote collaboration in global teams
It has not reduced the data storage cost. We have been trying to come up with a plan internally to archive project data at a certain time frame. However, our data continues to grow, so at the point of 25 terabytes, we had to buy another 25 terabytes license to exceed that threshold. It would have been nice if they had offered them in increments, of 5, 10, 15, or 20 terabytes than having to get a whole chunk of 25 terabytes again for licensing purposes, which is a little costly. It would be nice if Panzura offered data in increments instead of 25 terabytes per license. They have done a pretty good job of development from the point of offering new products. Pricing seems to be high for certain things, such as the audit feature of Panzura Data Services. It would be nice to see who deleted that 100 gig of data out there. They should make the pricing plan more attractive for a company of our size. We have almost 700 employees over the southeast from Texas to Florida and up to Tennessee, so we are a pretty big region.
Kishore CA - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes.
The only drawback is that it takes a bit of time during initial synchronization, especially after restarting the environment. This is a potential area of improvement. There's a synchronization time, but it takes time. Initially, when we start the first environment deployment, it starts synchronizing between the storage. So, it is taking time. One thing is that even when you restart. Let's assume that the synchronization is completed and the storage is synchronized. Both storages are fully synchronized, and it is in sync mode. Now, if we want to restart both nodes, there is a case for maintenance purposes. You took both nodes for maintenance, and we rebooted it. Then, it should not synchronize again. It should be a checksum. And if there is a checksum match, there should be no synchronization again. So, one thing that should be taken care of. Another thing is that I used freeware- the community version, free license, which we deployed using PowerShare. In that case, it was very difficult to bring back another node when one node was faulty. Let's assume that both the nodes are working fine. And we found one node faulty. And we destroyed all the volumes in that and tried to bring it back. So that was a difficult factor. The final solution is that we were not able to bring back the failed node. So, we reconstructed a new data source for that. That is another drawback. In future releases, I would like to see the integration with VMware or some other things as a plugin model for VMware.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which NAS solutions are best for your needs.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What are the products that Panzura provides?
Panzura offers four main products: CloudFS, data services, smart apps, and global services. They call this "all-in-one solution" and it's for end-to-end cloud data management. Why is it called that...
What kind of industries does Panzura serve?
Hello, I think businesses from all industries that have their data on a cloud can benefit from Panzura. Especially if you have offices in various locations or your employees are working from home a...
Why was Panzura acquired? Is the acquisition going to cause a change?
I think Panzura may change in a positive direction now that it's been bought by Profile Capital. That's a very big investment company for technology businesses and I think it's an opportunity for ...
What do you like most about StarWind Storage Appliance?
I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.
What needs improvement with StarWind Storage Appliance?
StarWind Storage Appliance's demo version should be similar to the paid one.
 

Also Known As

Panzura Freedom
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Petrofac, Komatsu, HCA Healthcare, Vanguard, Disney, Pokemon, US Department of Justice, Gensler, Fluor, AFRY, Milwaukee Tool, Navy Federal Credit Union, TechTarget
Bosch, EC2 IT, Solid Earth Inc., Canon
Find out what your peers are saying about Panzura CloudFS vs. StarWind Storage Appliance and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.