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Pivot3 vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 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

Pivot3
Ranking in HCI
26th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
StarWind Virtual SAN
Ranking in HCI
4th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
206
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Pivot3 is 1.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.2%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
StarWind Virtual SAN2.2%
Pivot31.4%
Other96.4%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1124199 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Manager at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Stable, good technical support, and the the visual encoding works well
The most valuable feature is the visual encoding I would like to see better video compression. Snapshot notification would be a good addition. The price of this solution is high compared to the competitors, so it should be lowered. I have been using Pivot3 for between four and five years. This…
Jccerong Heron - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Support team has guided us through deploying virtual storage on legacy hardware and reducing operational costs
The reason I chose StarWind Virtual SAN for this particular scenario is really the features, the ease of use, and most importantly, the price. In my opinion, the best features StarWind Virtual SAN offers are easy integration with the system installed in the data center. The integration with my existing systems in the data center works well, especially with VMware, as we already have a big cluster in VMware, and the easy integration with that is helpful to solve some problems with the platform. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by reducing OPEX costs. My OPEX costs have gone down as we reutilize some old servers, and this reduces the CAPEX of hardware in the data center.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"It greatly streamlined the time it took to scale out the enterprise and it completely eliminated the need for a SAN/Storage engineer, with the simplicity the Pivot3 Stack Manager brought with it for managing storage."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"The most valuable feature is the visual encoding."
"The technical support is very good."
"One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter."
"Compared to similar solutions from NetApp etc., our savings were likely in the tens of thousands of dollars over the years, and we did not need to pay for features that we do not need."
"Compared to other products that we looked at, the cost-saving was so great that choosing StarWind was a no-brainer."
"StarWind Virtual SAN was a bulls-eye."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"StarWind has allowed us to virtualize our environment without the huge expense of a dedicated SAN, putting cluster technology and its benefits within our reach."
"With zero cost I can test a solution like Proxmox, making Starwind VSAN an excellent tool for home lab and virtualization testing."
 

Cons

"Snapshot notification would be a good addition."
"In the next release, I would like to see compatibility and support for critical applications, like SAP."
"Marketing needs improvement."
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources."
"The price of this solution is high compared to the competitors, so it should be lowered."
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources"
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"It would be nice if we could designate pools, or tiers, for storage of different speeds, and then assign rules to new VMs that would automatically place them into the proper pool."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"The only "improvement" for the software would be having a web-based GUI interface for monitoring their storage nodes."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our fees are approximately $100,000 yearly."
"This solution is very accessible and the pro-level for support is well worth the cost."
"Once you buy the license, you are free to build your own hardware solution based on your needs."
"I think the cost of this solution is quite fair."
"Licensing is based on nodes rather than TBs, which means that the users are free to increase storage capacity without putting thought into licensing."
"We evaluated other options and this one was the most cost-effective."
"There are two tiers of support and in my opinion, support is worth the cost."
"The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
"This is a good, economical solution compared to data storage systems."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business166
Midsize Enterprise54
Large Enterprise34
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was very good. We were able to get the software at a good cost. I did most of the setup, so there wasn't really any cost there. The professiona...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
The only thing that I would say about documentation is there are some aspects of the documentation that are a little bit unclear. However, when I worked through those issues with their professional...
What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?
Our main use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is hyper-convergence of a two-node cluster. We have multiple servers up and running at all times for our operations, and we were able to use StarWind Virt...
 

Also Known As

No data available
StarWind SAN & NAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SNHMC, HPD Software, The Hurlingham Club, NHS, Rochester Police Department, The Doe Run Company, 101 Casino, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport
Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Find out what your peers are saying about Pivot3 vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
886,426 professionals have used our research since 2012.