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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."
"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."
"The technical support is very good."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"The storage system has been a great expansion of our capabilities to store large amounts of data since we previously relied on cloud storage which became exponentially more expensive as we expanded our data collection and our pipelines which required more virtual machines and hence more storage."
"Still, it never lets us down, and we never lost our data."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"StarWind VSAN eliminates the NAS/SAN as a single point of failure and is an affordable synchronous HA storage solution which allows us to use extremely fast direct-attached SSD storage in an HA environment."
"StarWind Virtual SAN gave us the capability to have shared storage between Hyper-V hosts without buying external storage or using VMware instead of Hyper-V, allowing us to take advantage of existing servers on a very low budget during a worldwide server supply chain issue."
 

Cons

"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources."
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources"
"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."
"Snapshot notification would be a good addition."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"Central management webpage should be a must-have."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our fees are approximately $100,000 yearly."
"Licensing is easy and the whole package is cost-effective."
"There are two tiers of support and in my opinion, support is worth the cost."
"The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."
"Licensing is based on nodes rather than TBs, which means that the users are free to increase storage capacity without putting thought into licensing."
"This solution has competitive prices and the implementation is very easy."
"The cost, including OPEX, is lower compared to other solutions."
"Cost is affordable and licensing is smooth."
"I think the cost of this solution is quite fair."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
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.
893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.