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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
28th
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
205
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Pivot3 is 1.1%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.1%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
StarWind Virtual SAN2.1%
Pivot31.1%
Other96.8%
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 visual encoding."
"One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter."
"The technical support is very good."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"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."
"When I did some tests with StarWind, I stopped looking for anything more."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"The solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"The most important thing is that the vendor keeps developing and enhancing the solution to include more robust features."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"It's quite easy to manage."
 

Cons

"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources."
"The price of this solution is high compared to the competitors, so it should be lowered."
"In the next release, I would like to see compatibility and support for critical applications, like SAP."
"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."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example."
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"The scalability is probably not that great; with StarWind Virtual SAN you can either have a two-node cluster or a three-node cluster."
"The only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our fees are approximately $100,000 yearly."
"For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."
"I think that purchasing StarWind Virtual SAN Professional Edition would be optimal for most."
"StarWind is a low-cost, full-featured alternative to the traditional SAN environment, and their support will guide you every step of the setup."
"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."
"This solution is very accessible and the pro-level for support is well worth the cost."
"I think the cost of this solution is quite fair."
"StarWind is best price/performance for SMB."
"This is a good, economical solution compared to data storage systems."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business165
Midsize Enterprise54
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 was very good. We were able to get the software at a good cost. I did most of the setup, so there wasn't really any cost there. The professiona...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
The only thing that I would say about documentation is there are some aspects of the documentation that are a little bit unclear. However, when I worked through those issues with their professional...
What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?
Our main use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is hyper-convergence of a two-node cluster. We have multiple servers up and running at all times for our operations, and we were able to use StarWind Virt...
 

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: March 2026.
885,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.