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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 May 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

"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."
"One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter."
"The most valuable feature is the visual encoding."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"The technical support is very good."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by reducing OPEX costs."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations."
"We have High Availability, failover, redundancy, and the ability to move workloads on the fly with no impact on the organization."
 

Cons

"The price of this solution is high compared to the competitors, so it should be lowered."
"Snapshot notification would be a good addition."
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources."
"Marketing needs improvement."
"In the next release, I would like to see compatibility and support for critical applications, like SAP."
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources"
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes, and there are new features coming down the pipe, but it works great."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"At this moment, I have not seen a return on investment with StarWind Virtual SAN."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our fees are approximately $100,000 yearly."
"We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear."
"This solution is very accessible and the pro-level for support is well worth the cost."
"I think that purchasing StarWind Virtual SAN Professional Edition would be optimal for most."
"The cost takes into account the number of nodes, so the size of the storage is not important."
"The cost, including OPEX, is lower compared to other solutions."
"The Price/Performance ratio for this solution is outstanding!"
"The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."
"The free version is great to use for labs or test environments."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

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

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that we are using the free version, so we did not incur any cost.
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
The better features are in the paid version, and I would like to see something from the graphical user interface in the free version, which is not available. I wanted to see better understanding of...
What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?
In production, I wanted to use StarWind Virtual SAN for shared storage. My main use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is shared storage. I wanted shared storage with local resources for Hyper-V, specif...
 

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: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.