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HPE Zerto Software vs Unitrends comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 11, 2025

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

HPE Zerto Software
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
341
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (1st)
Unitrends
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
31st
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of HPE Zerto Software is 2.6%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Unitrends is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
HPE Zerto Software2.6%
Unitrends0.5%
Other96.9%
Backup and Recovery
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user177801 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 23, 2023
 

Featured Reviews

Sachin Vinay - PeerSpot reviewer
Leverage disaster recovery with reliable support and cost-effective future-proof features
Zerto is straightforward to implement because it only requires the installation of an agent on the VMs designated for migration. A service, typically a VM, must also be deployed at the disaster recovery location. This entire process is simple and can be completed within three days. Zerto's near-synchronous replication occurs every minute, allowing for highly granular recovery points. This means that even if interruptions or malware disruptions occur within that minute, Zerto can restore to the last known good state, effectively recovering the entire setup to the latest backup. This capability ensures high data security and minimizes potential data loss. One of the main benefits of implementing Zerto is its data compression, which significantly reduces the load on our IPsec VPN. Zerto compresses data by 80 percent before transmitting it across the VPN, minimizing the data transferred between geographically dispersed locations. This compression and subsequent decompression at the destination alleviate the strain on the VPN, preventing overload and ensuring efficient data synchronization. Zerto simplifies malware protection by integrating it into its disaster recovery and synchronization features. This comprehensive approach eliminates the need for separate antivirus setups in virtual machines and applications. It streamlines our security measures and removes the need for additional software or solutions, resulting in an excellent return on investment. Zerto's single-click recovery solution offers exceptional recovery speed. Through the user interface, a single click allows for a complete restoration from the most recent backup within two to three minutes, enabling rapid recovery and minimal downtime. Zerto's Recovery Time Objective is excellent. In the past, if a virtual machine crashed, we would recover it from a snapshot, which could take one to two hours. With Zerto, the recovery process takes only five minutes, and users are typically unaware of any disruption. This allows us to restore everything quickly and efficiently. Zerto has significantly reduced our downtime. When malware affects our data, Zerto immediately notifies us and helps us protect other applications, even those not yet implemented with Zerto. By monitoring these applications, we can quickly identify and address any potential malware spread, minimizing downtime across our systems. Zerto significantly reduces downtime and associated costs during disruptions. Our services are unified, so in the event of a disruption without Zerto, even a half-day disruption would necessitate offline procedures. This would lead to increased manpower, service delays, and substantial financial losses due to interrupted admissions and other critical processes. By unifying service processes, Zerto minimizes the impact of outages. Zerto streamlines our disaster recovery testing across multiple locations by enabling efficient failover testing without disrupting live services. Traditionally, DR testing required downtime of critical systems, but Zerto's replication and failover capabilities allow us to test in parallel with live operations. This non-disruptive approach ensures continuous service availability while validating our DR plan, even in scenarios like malware attacks, by creating a separate testing environment that mirrors the live setup. This comprehensive testing provides confidence in our ability to handle real-world incidents effectively. This saves us over 60 percent of the time. Zerto streamlines system administration tasks by automating many processes, thereby reducing the workload for multiple administrators. This allows them to focus on other university services that require attention and effectively reallocate support resources from automated tasks to those requiring more dedicated management. Zerto is used exclusively for our critical services, providing up to a 70 percent improvement in our IT resilience.
Todd Guthrie - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution can be used to back up servers and Hyper-V cluster nodes, but its support is super expensive
I wouldn't rate Unitrends a ten out of ten because we had some hard drive failures in the appliance. Typically, when you have OneDrive, you can get it replaced. For some particular reason, the situation caused the entire system to crash. We had to reinstall the CentOS operating system on it, and we lost all our backups. They said there was no way to retain it, and it was pretty devastating and concerning that a drive failure would cause the loss of all the data on the appliance. It was extremely disappointing, and we had to start from scratch after three years worth of backup data. I rate Unitrends a nine out of ten for stability.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The whole package is valuable. The most useful feature for the company is the rapid RTO, which offers a faster return to operations and brings us back online quicker. The last time we had an issue, we recovered within about 36 minutes, which was probably the most valuable thing for us because, previously, it took four to seven days."
"Its ease of use and scalability are valuable."
"I like the fact that Zerto is target agnostic. It doesn't care what type of storage it writes to. The journaling is also excellent. You can easily and quickly restore to seconds before an event. The immutable data copies feature is one reason we adopted Zerto. That's one of its selling points."
"Zerto ensures a smooth transition during a disaster when we need to automatically switch from our primary environment to our recovery one."
"The ability to have a RPO of seconds has enabled us to restore data to just before an incident has occurred, which certainly saves a lot of time and money."
"What I appreciate the most about HPE Zerto Software is that it works."
"It is pretty easy to use. The interface is intuitive and easy to use. Once you set it up, it just works. So, it is great."
"We can failover to an isolated environment and validate the application without impacting the production environment. We can do more testing in a non-impactful way..."
"I am impressed with the tool's reporting and UniView features."
"It is very easy to set up and get started. Almost too easy. We racked this device and had it up and running in less than 15 minutes."
"When I have had to use tech support, they've been very good."
"The simple and fast restore routine."
"It is fairly stable."
"The backup feature and recovery option are good because they allow the instant recovery of Hyper-V nodes and files."
"I really like the reporting options you get for various email reports."
"If you are a large organization, this is a product for you."
 

Cons

"I definitely would like to see the continuation of the migration capability to Hyper-V included in the next release of HPE Zerto Software, as well as adding migration capabilities to other hypervisors, such as Nutanix Acropolis."
"We did look at the long-term retention backup feature of Zerto a few years ago, and at that time, it was limited. I can't say what it is right now, but at the time, its functionality was limited in terms of basically where we could save it and how we could save it. Offsite air gapping our backups is important to us to help protect against ransomware, and at the time, it couldn't do that. That would be one area that would be important before we consider using the long-term retention again. I haven't looked at it recently, and they may have addressed this in the meantime, but if not, this would be an area of improvement."
"We've also found that certain situations will not work for us since we haven't finalized the air gap vault in place, and we know that using some simulated ransomware attacks would cause problems, so we wouldn't be able to recover."
"The biggest area for improvement is the technical support side. Although it has improved somewhat, after the HPE acquisition, it became apparent that level-one technical support was moved to groups unfamiliar with the Zerto product."
"HPE Zerto Software could be improved by including everything in the same package. Currently, I have to administer them separately, which can be more complicated for the infrastructure team."
"They just came out with improvements for ransomware protection last week. I haven't used them yet but, overall, security and preventing ransomware is really a hot topic these days. I would like to see it detect when the ransomware occurs and provide more information on it."
"Migration of complex VMware and Hyper-V solution. Using Zerto to replicate to azure and S3."
"Some of the features need improvement. One would be, as you're creating a Move group or a VPG, as they call it, it should either autosave or have the ability so that you can save it for coming back to later because if the setup times out, you lose all your work. That would be a nice improvement to have."
"Probably the biggest issue I've had is actually paying for the unit, and part of that problem is that they use a third party for the billing."
"The ability to run just differentials without pulling the full on your archive."
"There are a few quirks where the GUI, agent, and back-end are not precisely meshed."
"There's a lot that can be made better. For example, it could be more scalable."
"Comparing the features and the working pattern, definitely they have to come down on pricing if they want to compete in the market."
"I would like to see more storage options for the free version."
"It could be a little more customizable."
"Unitrends can be challenging to scale."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My understanding is that it's expensive but worth the price."
"Pricing is one area where there could be some improvement. We would like to see a consumption model that would charge in a DR scenario, where you're failing over and consuming those resources, instead of a per-protected-node model. Or it could be a model based on the amount of storage space you're protecting."
"It initially seemed a little pricey, but in the big picture, you're paying for peace of mind. It could always be cheaper and more competitive, which would make it an easier choice for people, but I can see both ways. They can say this cost is for the value they are providing. If anything happens, they can recover your data very quickly. You won't be losing it, so there is a win. It is a win-win."
"It is not cheap, but it is reasonable for what it is offering. It gives me the peace of mind that my data is protected. It is worth the cost."
"Obviously, I wish it were cheaper and more affordable. But I get what I pay for, so I can't complain."
"Its pricing is way better than Veeam."
"Get the Enterprise Cloud license because it's the most flexible, and the pricing should come in around $1,000 per VM."
"Zerto is not cheap but is an invaluable asset."
"I would rate the solution's pricing a four out of ten. The licensing is yearly and it depends on the customers."
"No comment."
"Their licensing depended on the number of CPUs you had."
"Initial pricing is competitive. Renewal pricing is steep, so make sure to project costs for the lifetime of the appliance(s)."
"Based on a scale of one to ten, with one being low and ten being high, I would rate the pricing of this solution as a three. Also, there are no additional costs involved in the standard licensing of the solution."
"Talk with the sales guys. They can work with you on the best package."
"Make sure you do the homework to size the solution properly. Buy the Enterprise Plus licensing if you can afford it."
"Unitrends is an expensive solution."
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Comparison Review

it_user159711 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 9, 2014
VMware SRM vs. Veeam vs. Zerto
Disaster recovery planning is something that seems challenging for all businesses. Virtualization in addition to its operational flexibility, and cost reduction benefits, has helped companies improve their DR posture. Virtualization has made it easier to move machines from production to…
 

Answers from the Community

it_user177801 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 20, 2016
Sep 20, 2016
We have recently implemented Zerto as a disaster recovery solution. Not only does it replicated, it allows you to created boot orders for the VM's. This means you can have your SQL server start and set an automatic delay for the applications servers. It can also be configured to bring a failover test up on an isolated network for DR testing. It can also replicate between different hypervisors. ...
2 out of 16 answers
it_user157908 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 5, 2015
Hello, Check the VBA module from networker legato software, it might be what you need. Kind Regards, John.
it_user136023 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 5, 2015
So does that mean you want to have a Disaster Recovery solution where data is not on site your bunker site? but yet allows for a fast recovery in case your primary site is down? - What virtualization solution do you use? - What is the link between the 2 (?) sites? - What RPO and RTO are you aiming for? - How much data do you need to recover?
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Retailer
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Educational Organization
10%
Non Profit
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business91
Midsize Enterprise85
Large Enterprise193
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?
Ik fluister:VM Host Oracle en DataGuard hebben we per toeval vervangen door Zerto :-) tijdens de Zerto implementatie en VPG werden de Host Data in write-ack Block-Level gerepliceerd. Qua licentie 1...
What do you like most about Zerto?
Its ability to roll back if the VM or the server that you are recovering does not come up right is also valuable. You have the ability to roll back a few seconds or a few minutes. The rollback feat...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zerto?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing, I think on the pricing side, I don't generally deal with it, but from what I hear from my finance team, it's somewhat on the higher...
What do you like most about Unitrends?
The most valuable feature of Unitrends for me is the automated feedback
What needs improvement with Unitrends?
In terms of improvement, the UI, especially in the recovery section, is unclear about which repository it uses—I had to hover over to find that information. Figuring out the scripting part wasn't s...
What is your primary use case for Unitrends?
I use Unitrends to back up my VMware virtual machines and files, ensuring redundancy for both disks and protection against ransomware. I have implemented an air gap strategy by keeping some backups...
 

Also Known As

Zerto Virtual Replication
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
NHL Players Association, Salvation Army, Sligro Food Group, Mason General Hospital, Tec Group, Saldab IT, Baker Tilly, Clinton Savings Bank, Ennit Magna Bank, Manukau Institute of Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Zerto Software vs. Unitrends and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.