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Bacula Enterprise vs Dell PowerProtect Data Domain comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (27th), Cloud Backup (13th)
Dell PowerProtect Data Domain
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
Deduplication Software (1st), Disk Based Backup Systems (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Bacula Enterprise and Dell PowerProtect Data Domain aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Bacula Enterprise is designed for Backup and Recovery and holds a mindshare of 1.0%, up 0.8% compared to last year.
Dell PowerProtect Data Domain, on the other hand, focuses on Deduplication Software, holds 25.4% mindshare, down 29.2% since last year.
Backup and Recovery Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Bacula Enterprise1.0%
Veeam Data Platform7.6%
Commvault Cloud4.4%
Other87.0%
Backup and Recovery
Deduplication Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Dell PowerProtect Data Domain25.4%
HPE StoreOnce18.1%
Dell PowerProtect Data Manager12.7%
Other43.8%
Deduplication Software
 

Featured Reviews

GiovanniRamirez - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Consultant at Xerif
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…
Branko Cirovic - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage Engineer at Comtrade Group
Provides seamless backup integration and long-term reliability for enterprise data protection
The price is quite high; this product is not considered cheap. Additionally, if you use higher availability boxes, they also come at a premium price. However, they provide business continuity, which is the main reason why companies invest in this solution. Tape is slow; when restoring several virtual machines or databases amounting to several terabytes, Dell PowerProtect Data Domain represents the fastest and most reliable solution, ensuring great integration with backup software. If a customer has limited budget constraints, they may opt for cheaper external storage comprised of just a bunch of disks and utilize it for backup, as backup is not a business-critical service. However, I see great value in Dell PowerProtect Data Domain because it is fully automated, features great integration with backup software, and provides good value for money. I would rate software support as a ten, while I would give hardware support a seven. I never give any product a perfect score; I think Dell PowerProtect Data Domain deserves a nine. The only minor problems are the certificate issue and the price. These certificate issues are quite rare and mainly arise when we forget to restart and upgrade the box for several years.

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 brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."
"The most valuable features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."
"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."
"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"It works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."
"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."
"Bacula is pretty stable."
"The stability is excellent."
"The most valuable features of Dell PowerProtect DD are ease of use and deduplication."
"The most valuable features of the solution are recovery point, compression, and deduplication."
"Most cases are related to databases, such as Oracle and MySQL."
"The most valuable features of Dell PowerProtect DD are reduplication and compression. It provides a lot of data savings for backups. Additionally, the Dell PowerProtect DD solution offers a bundled backup software and storage option. If desired, users can also connect to cloud technology to create an additional copy of their data in the cloud. This solution supports synchronization with various cloud vendors, including Azure and AWS."
"It's deduplication and faster recovery that are the key features."
"My advice to other organizations considering Dell PowerProtect Data Domain is that if you are looking for a cost-effective solution that provides a very good compression and deduplication ratio, then certainly you should implement Dell PowerProtect Data Domain as it integrates well with any backup technologies."
"Dell PowerProtect Data Domain has impacted my data protection processes positively, and it remains the best solution for my needs."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."
"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."
"If we lose the admin password, Dell always asks for separate charges."
"It could be more secure."
"The price is quite high; this product is not considered cheap."
"The price is quite high; this product is not considered cheap."
"First-time integrations are difficult in NetWorker. NetWorker software needs to be simplified. It's very complex."
"The licensing is not cost-effective, and the pricing could be better."
"They need to make migration easier."
"DD doesn't have Intel's air gap technology."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."
"We have a perpetual license."
"It could be more competitively priced. Its licensing was for five years. Obviously, the support will get renewed at some stage, but that's it."
"On a scale where one represents high price, and ten represents low price, I rate the solution a five, which means that the solution is of medium pricing."
"If we do not move to the cloud solution and stay with our on-premise version we will miss some new features."
"The cost is expensive."
"The price is on the high side."
"The price may be a bit higher than other products in the market, but you will receive ten out of ten support with next-business-day delivery on parts' availability."
"It is expensive, but the performance and deduplication cover for the cost."
"The price of the solution and support for Dell PowerProtect DD is expensive. We have customers that cannot upgrade to a newer version of the solution because the support is too expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business35
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise38
 

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 primary use case for Dell EMC PowerProtect DD (Data Domain)?
My use cases for it involve primarily backing up the on-premises servers, and besides that, we also provision CIFS shares and NFS exports on Dell PowerProtect Data Domain.
What do you like most about Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain)?
The product, a disk backup solution, improves our data application tasks. We used tape libraries with Dev drives in legacy architectures, resulting in slow backups compared to modern drives like NV...
 

Also Known As

No data available
DataDomain, Dell EMC Data Domain, PowerProtect Data Domain
 

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.
The US Army, City of Houston, Lloyds TSB, TiVo, Teck, Ingram Entertainment, The New York Mets
Find out what your peers are saying about Veeam Software, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Commvault and others in Backup and Recovery. Updated: January 2026.
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