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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."
"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 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."
"StarWind Virtual SAN has impacted my organization positively with a one hundred percent improvement in uptime."
"All we really wanted was a system that once it was set up just worked, and that's exactly what we have found to be the case in StarWind's Virtual SAN."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"The best features StarWind Virtual SAN offers in my experience are that there is a free version and it can be used as hyper-converged storage over multiple nodes."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"The feature I have found most valuable in VSAN is its high availability capability."
"I have never worked with a company who is as responsive and helpful with everything I run into."
 

Cons

"Marketing needs improvement."
"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."
"The price of this solution is high compared to the competitors, so it should be lowered."
"Snapshot notification would be a good addition."
"Having large support for filesystems is important to our organization, as we sometimes use proprietary filesystems like WekaFS for some of the tasks, especially in the era of Exascale computing."
"StarWind doesn't really have any performance reporting, especially compared with other vSAN products we've used."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided. That way, the customer doesn't have to log in to a specific server where the product is running."
"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."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our fees are approximately $100,000 yearly."
"When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
"StarWind is best price/performance for SMB."
"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."
"I think the cost of this solution is quite fair."
"Once you buy the license, you are free to build your own hardware solution based on your needs."
"This solution has a great price for the functionality."
"We evaluated other options and this one was the most cost-effective."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
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?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that pricing was straightforward. The setup costs were invoiced to us, we paid that, and then we were able to schedule a time to work with a...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
I think that StarWind Virtual SAN can be improved in terms of scalability. Currently, we have a two-node cluster, and the maximum that is available is a three-node cluster. Being able to scale beyo...
What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?
My main use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is to be able to utilize directly attached storage as a SAN. A specific example of how I use StarWind Virtual SAN for directly attached storage is that we ...
 

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.
899,917 professionals have used our research since 2012.