Nakivo Reviews

We're using Nakivo primarily for backup, replication, and recovery. It helps us back up our databases and files in Microsoft or other OS types. There are other features we don't use, like multi-environment management. 

In the future, we might use some of the features they've added in the latest edition, like VM monitoring. I discussed this option today with one of our partners, and they said you could consolidate tools instead of buying another solution for VM monitoring tools. That way, you can manage two solutions from one console. However, we only need backup replication for our current infrastructure needs. We have not used the multi-site capabilities because we have no current demand.

All our customers give the same feedback on Nakivo. They tell us they appreciate the user-friendly interface and the space savings they realize from Nakivo's compression. The slick interface, low price, and compression are valuable for us. 

Nakivo's reporting features have helped a lot. They give my boss high visibility into what's going on, which is crucial because we had a data breach in the past where we lost about 12 years of data. That's why we bought several appliances, and we replicate the same backup twice a day to three different depositories. 

Nakivo is fast and user-friendly. Compression over Othernet is the best feature, and Nakivo's object-level restoration is also excellent. All the features are well designed, work properly, and meet our needs, and there are some extra features that we don't use.

Some of Nakivo's backup features need improvement. For example, I would like some more options for job scheduling. We can only schedule incremental and full backup, but there are no differential backup features in the same job. I can only schedule one incremental and one full backup in a week. 

I schedule three jobs for each repository, which is the simplest way to plan your jobs. It's possible to consolidate three jobs into one, but when you want to explain the backup registration schema to someone, they can't understand what they don't see. When you schedule some jobs, you should be able to see a list of the jobs contained within each. You have to open up the editor to see what is inside. You must click through and edit stuff. Each time, it asks you to save or discard changes. It's very annoying. You only see the name of the scheduled job, and you need to edit it to see what's it's inside.

I am a Nakivo regional reseller, and I've been using this product since 2015.

Nakivo is highly stable. In the past six years, I've never had a backup fail. It can sometimes happen, but only if you run out of space. 

You can scale up just by paying for more licenses. There are options. For example, if you buy a new server, you need extra licenses, and when you purchase an additional license, you must buy another month for the previous license. The scalability is flexible. One of our clients has 12 circuits, but we sell six circuits for each on average.

We had a big problem where we didn't know what happened to our clients' servers, but we ultimately realized it was a problem on our side. Overall, Nakivo's support was fast. They instantly respond via call or via email.

The backup and replication method for most solutions is the same. For example, Nakivo and Veeam are similar, but Veeam has many options we will never use, and we get a lot of questions about features customers don't need.

It's more complicated to perform the same jobs using Veritas, which is designed for huge companies, like telecoms and multinational companies. It's more of an enterprise solution, so the price is much higher.

The deployment process is about the same for any client because some features are grayed out when you have a licensed product. The specific installation and deployment process depends on the licensing, but the basic menus are the same. You can buy Nakivo online and start using it in less than an hour. 

I took two or three different training courses to learn how to use Nakivo. They were helpful. We have several engineers involved in deploying and maintaining the solution, but their jobs are mixed. We don't have one designated person who handles backup solutions.

However, Nakivo handles most of the maintenance on our ongoing projects. For example, if you make a backup, Nakivo will check the integrity of your data. It's a valuable feature. 

A backup and replication solution is an essential investment for most businesses. If you're using replication, you don't need to spend money on testing infrastructure, so Nakivo will save you about 60 percent on testing costs. 

Nakivo's licensing is straightforward compared to some other vendors who make purchasing hard. Nakivo's licensing is flexible. If your infrastructure changes or you have some new needs, you can find the cheapest price. 

I rate Nakivo 10 out of 10. The two major advantages of going with Nakivo are support and price. We work with mid-sized companies, and these are their primary concerns. 

We use this software to back up all of our servers, databases, and log files as well as create bare metal recovery backups incase a server fails. 

When a server has failed in the past, Nakivo's been a great help as it's able to restore an entire operating system with its configuration and files basically everything. Therefore, when a server failed we simply wiped the drive and restored everything via Nakivo and haven't had a single problem. We've never had a restore operation fail on us due to a corrupted backup. 

This amazing software is highly recommended. We also use it on our Hyper-V environment and it's able to restore directly into Hyper-V and start the VM with no configuration required afterwards as it's a 1:1 replica of the server.

Nakivo improved our backup environment as it added yet another backup for us to have. 

We use multiple backup software like the Windows Server backup, EaseUS TODO Backup, and SQL SMSS DB Backup including other third-party backup software dedicated for their software. 

Nakivo's able to do everything these programs can do and is able to work with NAS shares, SMB shares, and many others. The best part about it is when we've ever tried to restore to verify the backups we've never had a problem in the four years and we regularly verify the backups every three months.

One of the most valuable features we've been using is the whole system backup. It works the best out of so many different applications without a doubt. The ease of use management server website, reliability, email notifications if the job is unsuccessful (and successful), and the performance are top-notch. It uses all the bandwidth available if not limited and backs up entire servers with all data about four times faster than Windows Server Backup and EaseUS TODO Backup.

One of the things I liked least about this software is when an update was pushed to one of the servers we had, somehow we didn't receive the update and needed some quick troubleshooting. That said, the customer service team was able to help out within the hour and was amazing and very helpful from the first reply. Like you cant go wrong with their customer support team. If you have a problem, an inquiry, or just a general question about what you can do or how else you can incorporate it they will answer your question to your satisfaction within the first two replies - unlike a lot of other support teams that just follow scripts and procedures, these guys get right down to the point from the first email.

I've used the solution for about four years.

We verify backups every 3 months and have never had a single problem with them over four years. They are highly dependable.

The product is 100% the best in terms of scaling. It offers high-speed transfers for both restores and backups and doesn't congest networks even without bandwidth throttling.

They reply with a useful answer within the first two emails from starting the case. They are very knowledgeable people and don't follow a useless script like many big companies.

Positive

We used the Windows Server Backup which was unreliable.

We also used the Easeus TODO Backup, which had lots of failed backups due to files in the network sharing in the same folder as the backup job (previous backups causing errors).

The setup is very straightforward once you figure out what needs to be done.

The solution doesn't require that many resources for the actual virtual machine/dedicated server for its software. It is very efficiently designed and has very high performance without congesting the network.

Windows Server Backup - Unreliable but came with windows so assumed it should be able to get the job done but lots of corrupted backups when trying to verify integrity.

Easeus TODO Backup - Lots of failed backups due to files in network share in the same folder as the backup job (previous backups causing errors) other than that no problems with it. lots of cool functions too but nakivo offers everything plus extra.

I recommend this software for any medium to large businesses. It offers very good integrity of backups.

The solution is primarily used for small offices that are looking for backups for Microsoft 365 and they're looking for some local backup for their whole Office 365 environment.

The solution is a very cheap option. It's a clone of Veeam backup and it works in a very similar way for less cost.

They offer great support. The product offers chat options that are available right on the user interface, so at any time, you can reach out to support for assistance. I haven't seen a similar feature in any other solution. The Nakivo is the first one to have implemented it.

The user interface in general is very good. It's very lightweight. It's a web interface, which is quite good. In comparison, their main competition, Veeam, has an external web interface, which requires an additional component to be installed on the server which is not ideal.

The initial setup is simple. 

They continuously implement new features. For example, they have brought support for storage devices recently and they are bringing support for duplication appliances. They're constantly growing. 

It would be ideal if they offered a support portal for users. They should have a portal where the customer would be able to show all cases and the status of all cases and maybe create a new case. Instead, they support the solution directly on the graphical user interface inside their product. While it is easy to create a case in this way, a portal would still be an improvement. 

Due to the fact that we are HP and Fugit partners as well, it would be nice if Nakivo would allow support for HP and Fugit storage.

I've been using the solution for three or four years at this point. 

The solution is stable. It just works. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

It's pretty scalable. You have no issues expanding the solution if you need to. 

Three years ago, I did not have many clients on the solution. However, over the last two to three years, the number has grown and more people are using it. Many are migrating over from Veeam.

The support has always been very good. We are quite happy with the level of service we get. 

We also work with Veeam.

Veeam was the first solution that started to think about visualization backups. They were the first who started to offer this backup for a virtualized environment. Nakivo were the second and they basically cloned Veeam Backup. They created a cheap clone of Veeam Backup and the prices were much less than Veeam. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's very easy to implement, especially if we're talking about mass installations. First of all, they support MaaS. They can install their product on a MaaS network and can attach storage directly. Veeam Backup does not have such an option at all. The installation is very straightforward due to the fact that the installation looks like I'm installing a new application on an iPhone. It can't be simpler.

You only need one person to handle maintenance. 

The pricing of the product is very good. they are quite reasonable and less than other options. They are directly competing with Veeam and offer similar services at less cost.

We are partners with Nakivo.

While our company is using the on-premise deployment version of the solution, our customers are kind of a mix. Some of them use the cloud version and have a backup for the cloud environment. Some of them use on-premises as well.

If customers are looking for a global data application without using any appliances, for example, if they want to try to duplicate all backup jobs together, then Nakivo Backup would be the best option as it has a global data application and Veeam Backup doesn't. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. I like the solution, however, there is always room for improvement.

We are using Nakivo for backing up multiple Virtual Machines hosted over ESXi hosts in various locations.

The hosts vary from 6.0 to 6.7 and previously we had Nakivo running for 5.5 hosts as well, which have since been dismissed.

When we started, we had also older 4.1 hosts which were covered by a special transporter used for legacy systems.

Since then, we have performed various upgrades to both the ESXi hosts, and Nakivo always worked flawlessly. It becomes better with each upgrade. 

For us, the capability of using Nakivo with the un-licensed version of ESXi is the biggest selling point.

The ease of use and the intuitive interface are also quite nice, and the various upgrades from Nakivo's side are great.

The UI has been reworked from the 9.x to the 10.x version and the new one is really good.

Thanks to Nakivo, we were able to perform a disaster recovery procedure during early 2021, losing little to no data, and the only thing slowing us down during the recovery was the speed of the new host.

The ability to backup Virtual Machines on the un-licensed version of ESXi is the main selling point for us.

The backups, especially of the incremental type, are really quick (ranging from five to 10 to 45 to 50 minutes depending on the size of the VM).

The recoveries are also quite quick, of course, depending on the host system. Generally, it recovers over the network and does not take more than an hour, again, depending on various factors unrelated to Nakivo.

The ability to retrieve individual files from a backup is a welcome plus which we discovered and found pretty useful.

Personally, I would like to have the ability to backup older legacy systems on the new versions as well.

I'd like the ability to perform individual backups (so a backup from inside the system instead of on the host side) - which right now is limited to newer Operating Systems, which, while is a good thing from a security point of view. That said, sometimes there is an older machine or VM which could use backups like this.

For our usage, we've found the connections to remote shares (like CIFS or NFS) while quite easy to set up are a little bit prone to interruption. Of course, in the next availability check performed autonomously by Nakivo, the connection is restored. This could of course be a problem with the destination share, however, it's really the only "issue" we've had with this software.

I've used the solution since 2018.

The stability of the software is great; we've never had a problem with it or with the updates.

The customer support is awesome and the support service is also great and quite qualified.

We don't have much experience with them as we had to contact them just once for clarification and not a real problem. 

Positive

Previously we had a custom backup procedure. We switched due to the impracticality of maintaining that system and the ease of use of Nakivo.

The initial setup is totally straightforward with little to no specific competence required, at least, not on the networking side.

Our in-house team managed the implementation.

The software did completely repay itself, especially when we had to activate the disaster recovery plan.

The price is really competitive. The offering, as well as the ability to use it with free ESXi, is awesome.

The setup is as easy as deploying a VM.  

We valued other options, both for individual and granular files backups, such as BackupPC, and also for host systems, such as Veeam.

We chose Nakivo due to its higher feature offering at a lower price point compared to other alternatives.

We're pretty satisfied with the product. I'm also evaluating it for personal non-work-related use.

I use NAKIVO backup and replication for several of my clients. I have replaced the product called Veeam Backup and Replication. We are a small IT service and repair center and we have many large clients running VMware 6, 6.5, and 7.  We use vCenter for all of our VMs. I have three different clients using this product. One client has four servers running two CPUs each and ESXi 6.7.  This client is running NAKIVO 10.2 as an appliance server and replicating the other three server's VMs.

The general cost of doing backups has been reduced. Also, the screenshot verification feature is priceless. I know right when I have an issue. At first, NAKIVO was a bit of a learning curve. It took several failures to figure of that some error messages were just canned messages and I had to dig deeper into the issue. As it turns out, the version of ESXi or vCenter with the proper version of the VM tool is very important for NAKIVO to get a good replication. The cost has been a huge issue using Veeam in the past and if you have ever tried to buy a license for Veeam, you already know it is almost impossible.

The test reboot of replicated VM and screenshot verification is great. NAKIVO is easy to use and pretty easy to set up. I use the appliance for all of my VM backups and replications. It runs as its own VM and you connect via a web browser. I have found Edge works best. The ease of purchasing a license from Nakivo has been one of the many features I have appreciated. I could not dislike purchasing a Veeam license more than anyone else in the IT industry. Having to jump through the hoops at Veeam and then after 10 plus emails, you might get an order from Techdata. It's just a joke.

Updating VM Tools on a replicated VM could be better. I think one of the most important things NAKIVO can do is stop releasing a new version several times a year. It's important to "get it right" on a version release - too many updates will cause an issue. Also, any version update should include the ESXi Host as well as the vCenter. Not taking into consideration the vCenter version is a huge mistake and no updates should be released unless they also support the current vCenter version. That came up and I had several issues before I figured out it was a vCneter update compatibility issue.

I have been using the solution for one year.

It can be a little touchy. When the IP cannot be reached there is not much you can do. You have to figure out why the IP of the appliance cannot be reached.

The solution can scale. I have it backing up and replicating 4 servers with almost no issues.

It has not been the best. I ran into some issues right away and support got on and tried to help me. I ended up working on the issue for a week and ended up figuring it out myself.  I have tried to stay away from support altogether since then.

I used Veeam previously. I switched mainly because of the problems I always encountered while trying to order Veeam. This company is the absolute worst in the business - not to mention the price of a license.

Yes, I did not have any issue installing the solution.

I handled the setup myself.

The yearly maintenance fees are okay but they could be better.

The cost is important but I think using the appliance is probably the best as it's easy to install.

I did not evaluate other options.

I do not have any additional comments.

We are using Nakivo Backup & Replication to back up ten virtual machines from our Nutanix cluster with some 80 virtual machines. Our goal is to replace the existing backup solution completely with Nakivo Backup and Replication and to have an offsite backup of all important servers to one of our branch offices with a Synology NAS with Nakivo Transporter installed. Offices are connected with a 500 MB VPN; the Nakivo appliance is running on our Nutanix cluster. Currently, we are using an Enterprise Essentials license.

Veeam Backup and Replication is the main backup solution at our customer's site, but it stopped working while backing up our now 5TB file server - and after some weeks of investigating the whole issue with Veeam support, I had to decide to search for an alternative solution. Nakivo offered a free trial which was very easy to set up and immediately worked. To be totally honest, it has an affordable price. 

The bandwidth-optimized deduplicated offsite backup to a Synology NAS was another must-have, which would have been possible with Veeam, too, but we would have had to build a Windows-based server for that.

The first really good thing about Nakivo Backup and Replication was the fact that I could install and configure the trial version in maybe half an hour and had a successful backup of our file server on the same night. I used different repositories to test - a Synology NAS with Nakivo Transporter and a CIFS share on a Windows bases server. Both worked without any problems. Then there was another point, that was really important to me: having an offsite backup to a Synology NAS at an office branch. I had to take a look at some options to optimize data flow, but the backup copy job works like a charm.

At the moment, there are actually not many features I am missing. It would be good if I could have a remote upgrade of our Synology Transporters, but the manual upgrade is easy and no problem at all. 

Some SNMP features to configure our monitor software would be great since emails sent to me sometimes could be lost in all those other mails. 

Some customers from Germany might have a problem when contacting English speaking sales and support team, but that has never been a problem to me, although my English hasn't been used much in the last couple of years.

I've been using Nakivo Backup & Replication for Nutanix since 2020.

There have been no crashes and no unfixable errors (there is a good knowledge base, and self-explaining error messages).

Since I'm using Nakivo to backup only ten virtual machines at the moment, I will have to wait until I backup my whole Nutanix cluster to find out about the scalability.

The sales representatives are nice; we didn't need technical support.

I'm still using Veeam Backup and Replication, but since this solution had huge problems backing up our file server (5 TB), I switched to Nakivo for some servers and will be completely replacing replacing Veeam by the end of its maintenance.

Yes, if you just follow the steps outlined in the setup assistant, you get it going in less than half an hour.

I implemented the solution by myself.

After weeks of working with Veeam support without any success, I can say it was worth every Euro spent since I have a working solution and can sleep better.

Nakivo has way lower licensing costs than Veeam - at least in our environment, with Nutanix as the protected cluster. Talk to your sales representative; they sold me the right license.

I am using Veeam and tested only Nakivo as a possible replacement.

I do not have any other comments at this time. 

This is a standout backup, replication, and rapid recovery solution for any small to medium-sized business which has a virtualized server environment - particularly for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V.

Probably the best recommendation is the fact that we choose to use this ourselves. As a value added reseller/consultant, we have access to many products. We recommend it to smaller vSphere sites where it provides an excellent alternative to the likes of Veeam and the expensive HA options from VMware.

The architecture is excellent and real-life practical, not only for backups to local backup repositories but also for remote backup repositories and/or cloud storage. The virtual machine replication with multiple snapshots between physical hosts provides a cost-effective alternative to those who cannot afford/can't justify a full high availability solution.

It has massively simplified the backup process and management of backups when compared to the previous solution. Backup times are much quicker.

The pre-configured virtual machine means installation onto a vSphere host takes minutes, requiring little more than the allocating of an IP address for the web console and a few credentials. We quite literally install the virtual machine, create a backup repository, link Nakivo to our vSphere environment, and have the first backup running in under twenty minutes.

Email notifications make the ongoing monitoring of the system simplicity itself.

Many of these have been mention already.

The direct support from Nakivo has been excellent when we have had issues. The built-in link in the web console to request support and automatically include a support bundle with all the relevant configuration data for your system makes requesting support easy - not that we have had to do it very often.

They also seem to be listening to the customer base. It is one of the few products where you feel you are getting value for the ongoing support costs. There is a continuous stream of useful updates and new features.

The speed of the backups and replications is fantastic and, for the most part, the simplicity of use has been wonderful.

The interface can be a little clunky at times. I guess this is partly the nature of the beast, being as it is a browser-based console. The benefits of the browser-based console, for the most part, far outweigh the occasional clunkiness of the interface.

Support for the backup and replication of virtual machines is excellent, but improved support for physical machine backups would be very welcome (I believe this is already on the way). 

With the current pricing model, the per workstation costs can soon rack up, so as to make it prohibitive to have a blanket backup policy for all workstations.

I've been using this solution for 5 years.

In the time we have used it and recommended it, it has been incredibly stable. We have managed to corrupt a backup repository by physically pulling the plug mid-job, but that is about it.

It will scale easily to match the recourses available.

Support via the web console has been very straightforward and the response has been prompt and knowledgeable.

We have not had any phone support.

I did previously use Acronis.

Nakivo, overall, provided a more complete, simpler, and cost-effective solution - particularly in the virtual environment.

The solution is very simple to deploy, as already mentioned.

In a smaller environment (less than three physical hosts) the Enterprise Plus is an excellent solution, particularly with the perpetual pricing available. 

I'd advise new users to take note of the ongoing support costs which currently are well worth having. 

Nakivo seems to be focused on developing and improving the product.

I did evaluate many options before choosing this.

I use the product for backing up my VMware VSphere and Microsoft HyperV Server. 

The first time I chose Nakivo was because we were facing a problem with a system that we used which was very expensive to renew. 

We found Nakivo from a website - one for VMware experts - and we tried to download the trial version.

The first time, we installed it on a physical machine that was running on a Windows Server - a 2012 Standard Edition.

At that time, we had 7 servers, including VMware ESXI and 1 VMware VCenter. Our VM at that time was around 50 VMs. After the trial, we were very interested in this product. After we tried to back up our Hyper-V VM in another system that we had, we found that all the systems were running well. That made us happy because we finally found a good product for backup that had a reasonable price.  

Basically, we were very interested in Nakivo because it was easy to install and support was able to install on devices like Synology, Windows Server, or even a client virtual or physical server. Using the web interface made it easy to configure and manage. 

It was easy to deploy a transporter to make process backup and replication faster and more reliable. Nakivo ensured our organization had good backup and replication software. 

We like the capability of Nakivo in terms of being able to restore files, folders, Active Directory objects, and so on. 

One feature that we like most is network acceleration. It also makes process backups between sites that we have more reliable. 

We like the site recovery system that Nakivo offers because it helps us with orchestration site recovery on our VM from one site to another site without having to deal with any manual processes. 

The transporter is one thing that we often use when we have installed a new server for our system. 

The chat functionality with Nakivo Support in the web interface is very unique and we love it.

In my opinion, Nakivo should consider having native abilities to be able to backup and replicate several applications. For example, an application based on a microservice such as a container app or orchestration using Kubernetes would be better if Nakivo had the ability to backup or replicate without depending on a hypervisor. 

Right now we know that Nakivo has the ability to back up as an incremental process and restore backups across several criteria. However, it would be good if we had the ability to backup a system like PostgreSQL.

I have been using Nakivo for around 5 years.

In my experience with Nakivo, we like that every backup process is successful and when we restore it, it is as is like the source material. Until now, it has been very stable and we have not had any problems.

We can add more storage as a respository very easily because it supports several systems such as NFS and CIFS.

We only have contacted customer service and support once. They were very responsive and helped us solve our problem.

We have changed from a previous system because that product was too expensive to renew and we needed a Windows license to install the backup system.

The setup is very straightforward and very easy to install, deploy, and configure.

No, we deployed the product ourselves.

Nakivo is a solution with reasonable TCO. 

After we calculated the fact that it was easy to install, easy to manage, etc., Nakivo still was the best option with a reasonable license price and renewal price year over year. 

Yes, we have tried several products such as Acronis, Commvault, and many more.