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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
209
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Pivot3 is 1.5%, up from 0.3% 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%
Pivot31.5%
Other96.3%
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 technical support is very good."
"The most valuable feature is the visual encoding."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter."
"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."
"StarWind vSAN has translated to a huge improvement in speed and high availability compared to our old iSCSI shared storage solution."
"The overall experience is really good, and Starwind VSAN has been working rock-solid from the launch."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to offer high availability service without purchasing external storage systems."
"By having StarWind, we're able to minimize maintenance impact and coordinating different support to be available around those timeframes."
"One point to highlight is how easy it is to configure and manage."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
 

Cons

"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources."
"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."
"The price of this solution is high compared to the competitors, so it should be lowered."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI."
"The documentation is sub-par. The pre-sales documentation and information is sub-par."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent. However, when they do occur, it makes it very challenging to figure out what the cause is."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each."
 

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."
"The setup cost, pricing, and licensing are very straightforward. They are exactly what you expect."
"The pricing is more than reasonable."
"The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."
"The cost, including OPEX, is lower compared to other solutions."
"The cost was ultimately low to implement, which allowed us to be 3-2-1 complaint."
"We evaluated other options and this one was the most cost-effective."
"We are happy with the price."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business167
Midsize Enterprise55
Large Enterprise34
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
StarWind Virtual SAN is very cost-effective for mid-level companies like ours, costing about one-sixth of what we would pay for a hardware solution that would require redundant hardware due to our ...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
I'm not certain how StarWind Virtual SAN can be improved. Perhaps they could have better technical support available for troubleshooting on our own, with better guidance and instructions. However, ...
What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?
We are operating in a remote area in Madagascar where networking and communication services are very limited, so we need a common storage solution for our two on-premises servers, which mirror each...
 

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: June 2026.
902,495 professionals have used our research since 2012.