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Bacula Enterprise vs IBM Storage Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 12, 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

Bacula Enterprise
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
25th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Backup (12th)
IBM Storage Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Bacula Enterprise is 1.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Storage Protect is 2.1%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Storage Protect2.1%
Bacula Enterprise1.0%
Other96.9%
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…
Syed Habib - PeerSpot reviewer
Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking
It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Bacula is pretty stable."
"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."
"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."
"It works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."
"The most valuable features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."
"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."
"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."
"Replication processes with container storage pools allow reduction of storage space and network bandwidth, using deduplication and compression."
"The most valuable features of Spectrum Protect would be the compression and the deduplication."
"A robust tool which allows us to backup pretty much any environment, virtual or physical."
"One of the main things that I like about IBM is the versioning of the data - meaning that we can have multiple versions of a file or directory of a server."
"In the past, one of the most valuable features, and the biggest advantage, was the incremental forever feature. Not many other backup vendors provided that. In the pre-virtualization environment, it was very robust and simple technology, especially writing to tape."
"The most valuable features are the stability and also how it's seamlessly integrated with other IBM offerings."
"The solution is mostly stable."
"We have a very good team of administrators who know the product perfectly and are able to manage it on a day-to-day basis."
 

Cons

"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."
"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."
"We are looking for a unique interface that can rule both enterprise and open source editions. Such a thing does not yet exist."
"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"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."
"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."
"An area for improvement would be the ease of use - the GUI is not up to the mark compared to other products in the market."
"It needs some software upgrades to fix some of its current bugs."
"The features should be a little bit closer together."
"The solution needs to work on disaster recovery integration. Basically, VMware applications to the cloud, for example. There needs to be integration with the storage, and integration with VMware."
"The deduplication must be perfect, and thus should be improved."
"The software is complex; setup is complex."
"Its management part can be better and simplified. It is kind of a beast as compared to Commvault or Veeam, but they are more user-friendly. They are also easier to learn, whereas Spectrum Protect definitely takes time. They should simplify it. Our teams are pretty comfortable with it because we have been using it for a long time, but from the perspective of a new user who is evaluating or using this solution, it is definitely more complex in terms of manageability. Its monitoring could be improved so that it can even monitor the jobs that are scheduled by external schedulers. There are situations where a database team might decide to use their own schedulers, but currently, Spectrum Protect is not able to catch those jobs in the Operation Manager console."
"Probably educating the virtual group who are not as used to the product. Most of our expertise is with AIX servers and virtual server backups."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."
"We have a perpetual license."
"We have capacity licensing. We use the front end. The capacity licensing is pretty okay on the licensing price. I used to use the old PVU-based licensing in the early environment, but now we use capacity-based licensing."
"Spectrum Protect is not a cheap option."
"License-wise regarding IBM, it's licensed per terabyte. And that is after compression and deduplication."
"I rate the pricing a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is not cost-effective, and ten is cost-effective."
"We are paying for support and maintenance on a monthly basis."
"It is very scalable, but the downside is that it costs money."
"The pricing model of this solution is another difficult area, it's very sophisticated in the way they charge. It's based on PBU, which is a type of processor, how, many processors, and you need to put everything into an equation. However, they have different ways of charging or licensing. One way is a back-end volume or front-end volume, which is quite complicated."
"We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective.​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
8%
 

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 Business53
Midsize Enterprise25
Large Enterprise94
 

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 do you like most about IBM Storage Protect?
The best point about IBM Storage Protect is that it can use IBM tape environments, which we still use and will continue to use in the future.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Storage Protect?
IBM Storage Protect is generally an expensive tool. However, with good contracts with IBM or its partners, the cost might not be so high. New customers can expect very high prices.
What needs improvement with IBM Storage Protect?
One point for improvement for IBM Spectrum Protect is security, as IBM has not been investing as much as in the past. There is a need for additional layers of security to fill the gaps, which is wh...
 

Also Known As

No data available
IBM Spectrum Discover
 

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.
CEMEX
Find out what your peers are saying about Bacula Enterprise vs. IBM Storage Protect and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.