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Bacula Enterprise vs Commvault Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 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

Bacula Enterprise
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
24th
Ranking in Cloud Backup
16th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Commvault Cloud
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Backup
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
eDiscovery (3rd), Disaster Recovery as a Service (2nd), File Archiving (1st), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (4th), SaaS Backup (2nd), Threat Deception Platforms (1st), Container Backup Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Bacula Enterprise is 1.1%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Commvault Cloud is 7.3%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

GiovanniRamirez - PeerSpot reviewer
Solid backup tool with good scalability
The last scenario in which I used Bacula was for a customer who needed some open-source tool which could support encryption at that time. We managed to convince the customer to use Bacula to deploy it in their environment It was a very good project. The Bacula concept, topology, and networking…
Matt Reller - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides extremely fast backup, is easy to manage, and is flexible
Commvault Cloud's automated policies provide the notification we need to ensure our data is secure and managed correctly. Commvault Cloud provides excellent visibility across all of our organization's data. It is extremely important to our organization that Commvault has a unified platform that offers recovery across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS workloads. It has helped our organization improve by simplifying the way we manage our environment. We could not manage the same environment with only half of our current staff. We have yet to find anything in our environment that Commvault does not support. Commvault Cloud's Risk Analysis helps us identify, categorize, and classify sensitive data enabling us to take the appropriate actions to protect it. Commvault does a good job helping us limit our exposure and ensure compliance. Commvault has helped us reduce our data management costs significantly. Compared to Dell Avamar, the costs are vastly different. Commvault is much more cost-effective. We are licensed by capacity, so we don't have to worry about licensing different features. We have all the features that are licensed by capacity. And as far as ongoing support costs and other expenses, they are much lower than what they were with Dell Avamar. Commvault also gives us the flexibility to use any storage we want, while Avamar is tied to the Data Domain, which is not cheap to support. It has helped us reduce our backup time unless we are using Data Domain. This is because we can perform deduplication and compression on the client layer, which reduces the load on the network. We cannot do this with Data Domain. In fact, if we even attempt to perform a quick progress check before sending data to the Data Domain, the system fails completely. We learned this the hard way. We are using many more advanced features in Commvault Cloud than we ever did in Dell Avamar, simply because we had to license each feature separately in Avamar. As a result, we did not perform many backups in Avamar, such as all database backups (DB2, SAP HANA, Oracle, and SQL). These backups were performed outside of Avamar. We are now using Direct Connect agents for all of our databases. This allows us to perform incremental backups, which we could not do with the previous method. As a result, we have reduced our backup times by two-thirds, or even more in some cases. Compared to when we were backing up directly to Data Domain, Commvault is now running our backups ten times faster. This has resulted in a significant reduction in our backup times. Commvault has helped us reduce the RPO. Even in Data Domain, it has reduced our storage times by about half. It has also helped us reduce the threat detection time. We reduced the RTO significantly with Commvault. Commvault has helped us reduce downtime primarily due to the increase in the performance of resources.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."
"It works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."
"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."
"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."
"The most valuable features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."
"Bacula is pretty stable."
"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."
"It never fails. Sometimes we miss a backup, but there's always a reason for it, and it's not the fault of Commvault. In the last three years, we've never had to open a ticket with Commvault."
"One of the most valuable features is the encryption which helps save you from ransomware. Because the data is already encrypted, it cannot be encrypted again."
"Commvault Cloud stands out for its ease of use and reliable backups, along with its ability to handle large data volumes for VMs, servers, and applications."
"Commvault gives us a single platform to manage and recover our data. Since we are a research organization, backup is one of the most critical parts of our IT operations and services. Internally, we run it as a managed service, and there is a single console that makes it easy for management to see the performance."
"Among the best features are the BMR (Bare Metal Recovery), Live Sync, and IntelliSnap, which is used for snapshots of hypervisor storage. It's predefined so you only need to enable it and it works. I haven't seen anything like this in other backup tools like Veritas NetBackup or Dell EMC or TSM. We will use snapshotting for all our machines."
"It's easy to configure multiple jobs and media agent locations for each server. We do offsite backups for all of our servers, but we also do onsite hourly backups of them. That has benefited us several times when we had an incident and didn't want to roll back a server an entire day."
"Metallic helped me to restore the data within an hour, which is much faster than restoring from Microsoft services."
"We can use it on-premises and in the cloud."
 

Cons

"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."
"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."
"We are looking for a unique interface that can rule both enterprise and open source editions. Such a thing does not yet exist."
"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."
"Bacula needs a graphical user interface because, for administrators, the command-line interface is okay, but for the average user it is not very easy."
"I think the one thing that could be improved is the customer experience. The interface should be more user friendly."
"The solution's breadth and depth of cloud support are good, but could be better. Some cloud features that are common-sense, especially on AWS, are not completely integrated yet in the product. They are a work-in-progress."
"The only problem is that some of what we snap most of is the VMs. We found about 10% of the VMs that we can't snap because they're too interactive. It actually causes the application to crash."
"Commvault Complete Data Protection meets market standards, but an area for improvement is its licensing model. It would be good if it could use the subscription-based model rather than the traditional licensing model."
"They don't market their products well. They don't do a lot of marketing to enable them to move forward."
"Its technical support could be better."
"Commvault could make the product more cost-effective on the public cloud side. We are using this solution to back up whatever is still on-prem. We are not using it to back up what is on the public cloud because we have a native backup solution for that, which is provided by the vendor. As our footprint gets bigger, we will continue to evaluate this, but the last time that we did a cost analysis, the cost was not comparable to the solution that public clouds are offering."
"You need quite a lot of human resources to maintain a Commvault environment, to keep it operational. Also, it would be nice to if there were an easier way set up some Commvault components."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a perpetual license."
"This is an open-source solution."
"It is a little too high. I would like to get more of a consumption model or more of a periodic true-up type of model that is more friendly to the ups and downs that you may have in your data instead of locking into multi-year agreements."
"The solution is worth the money."
"HyperScale X is expensive."
"We like that there is no extra cost for SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive. It is all mimicking Microsoft's model. Every user has one terabyte of space. When users start using OneDrive, everybody has one terabyte that will be backed up included in the price."
"Using a subscription-based license has been advantageous."
"The price is a little bit high."
"The solution is licensed based on the number of objects that we're going to back up, and that's a known quantity. As a result, we get predictable costs for our backup requirements."
"The tool is affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
University
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Bacula Enterprise?
Bacula is more expensive than various other solutions. It’s almost completely commercial now. Products like Veeam software are much more expensive.
What needs improvement with Bacula Enterprise?
Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability.
What is your primary use case for Bacula Enterprise?
The last scenario in which I used Bacula was for a customer who needed some open-source tool which could support encryption at that time. We managed to convince the customer to use Bacula to deploy...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Commvault?
The tool is affordable. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. Implementation requires additional costs because we need Commvault Professional Services.
What needs improvement with Commvault?
Data center backup must be improved. We also want the product to provide us with a cloud-based backup. If we use Microsoft Exchange Online for email services, we want to know how to get a backup in...
What do you like most about Commvault Complete Data Protection?
IntelliSnap and file system backups are valuable features.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale X, Metallic, ThreatWise
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NASA, SwissCom, Navisite, Turner Studios, Bank Austria, Caixa Bank, SdV Plurimedia, Leibniz University Hannover, Zeta Global, Tricore, NetLog, Siemens, LocaWeb, wbsGo, itesys, Queens School of Computing, Escrypt.
Aberdeenshire Council, Acxiom, BAM Group Ireland, Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, CI Investments, Clifford Chance, American Municipal Power, American Pacific Mortgage, AstraZeneca, Dongbu Steel, Denver Health, Dow Jones, Emirates Steel, Penn State Health, Prime Healthcare, Sonic Healthcare, Sony Network Communications, TiVO, UCONN Health, The Weitz Company
Find out what your peers are saying about Bacula Enterprise vs. Commvault Cloud and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.