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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
210
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 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 2.3%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
StarWind Virtual SAN2.3%
Pivot31.5%
Other96.2%
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."
"The technical support is very good."
"The most valuable feature is the visual encoding."
"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."
"After this success story, I have referred many of my customers to use this product; no complaints so far."
"Implementing Starwind in our organization has been a game-changer, particularly in terms of cost savings. By leveraging Starwind's virtual tape library (VTL) solution, we have been able to use virtual tapes for our backups, which are then saved in Azure Blob storage."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy SSD storage with very high availability at a good price at a time where all other vendors were pushing huge premiums on SSDs."
"StarWind Virtual SAN has helped us save considerable costs as we do not need a very large storage device such as a SAN as we had to purchase before."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"Until now, this is one of the best systems that we have and we have increased our partnership with them with another 3 node server."
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
 

Cons

"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."
"The price of this solution is high compared to the competitors, so it should be lowered."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved."
"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."
"While StarWind.com excels in numerous areas, there are a couple of notable functionalities that it currently lacks."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our fees are approximately $100,000 yearly."
"Cost is affordable and licensing is smooth."
"We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear."
"I think the cost of this solution is quite fair."
"This is the best priced solution for an SMB."
"Licensing is based on nodes rather than TBs, which means that the users are free to increase storage capacity without putting thought into licensing."
"Their pricing seems pretty good, and their licensing structure is pretty straightforward."
"There are two tiers of support and in my opinion, support is worth the cost."
"The cost was ultimately low to implement, which allowed us to be 3-2-1 complaint."
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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 Business168
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.
903,147 professionals have used our research since 2012.