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Bacula Enterprise vs IBM Storage Protect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 16, 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
27th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Backup (13th)
IBM Storage Protect
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Bacula Enterprise is 1.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Storage Protect is 1.8%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Storage Protect1.8%
Bacula Enterprise1.0%
Other97.2%
Backup and Recovery
 

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…
reviewer2787573 - PeerSpot reviewer
Interim Head of Infrastructure at a real estate/law firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Backup coverage has supported immutable protection and now needs a more modern, intuitive interface
IBM Storage Protect is from a previous generation of backup software. In those days, backup software was complex in setting up and complex to manage. The new software, such as Rubrik, is very easy to use and more relatable to younger engineers because its interface design is more similar to Office 365 and the newer controls and labels that we are accustomed to. The difficulty that we now have with IBM Storage Protect is that for this day and age, compared to other products that are out there, it seems complex. If we look back 15 years ago, all enterprise class backup software was complex, so IBM was not any different. However, many of these older systems, such as Commvault, still have the same complaint that they are very complex because they have tried to keep that same interface and the same way it works. This suits them, but it probably needed a complete overhaul to bring it into the ease of use that we have with modern software. However, that upgrade has not been done. IBM Storage Protect has not been upgraded into a modern platform. It still looks a legacy platform.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 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."
"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"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."
"Bacula is pretty stable."
"The MN backup for a cluster is most valuable because it has made backing up the GSF as a zero-file system easier. I like its stability a lot. Over the years, I very rarely had a problem with it."
"The main thing is to keep the data safe and in files, keep it on tape ready for a request from a bank, and it is working perfectly with all our hardware."
"We can scale. Today, we have an average backup volume of 100TB a day."
"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."
"It's very robust and has been on the market for a long time."
"Reliability: It has never had a problem with backups or restores. If you store something, it is there."
"Its incremental forever approach is valuable, so we don't have to load tapes to do a restore."
"It allows us to have one interface."
 

Cons

"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 are looking for a unique interface that can rule both enterprise and open source editions. Such a thing does not yet exist."
"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."
"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."
"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."
"There were scalability issues only in the brand new features which were recently released."
"Sometimes we experience trouble with the backup transfer of the control files."
"Some features are outdated as the product does not use the latest technologies. The graphical user interface, known as the operation center, is not very well designed. Additionally, IBM Storage Protect does not work well with virtual environments such as VMware and Hyper-V."
"The product should improve its GUI. It should also support Windows clustering."
"It can be improved for large file systems with many files. Spectrum Protect can restore large files very well, but if you're restoring millions of little files, it is not as great. At one point, we tried to implement the VMware module with it, and it was awful and terrible. I don't know if that has improved. If it hasn't, this would be one big improvement."
"It does not do too well in our virtual environment."
"We recently had a situation where we quickly got code, and the number of tapes exceeded the library capacity so we were waiting a while to change. We got a fix for this right away."
"Ease of use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."
"We have a perpetual license."
"License-wise regarding IBM, it's licensed per terabyte. And that is after compression and deduplication."
"It is really expensive. Its price is not good for Latin America. Its price is good for the United States or Europe."
"Licensing IBM Spectrum Protect can be somewhat confusing for new users due to the options available, such as licensing on a capacity or per server basis."
"It is very scalable, but the downside is that it costs money."
"IBM Spectrum Protect, cost-wise, has way higher pricing than Veeam. By switching over to Veeam, my company saved over $600,000 in USD. The IBM Spectrum Protect pricing is a two on a scale of one to ten. My company paid additional fees for maintenance, apart from the standard licensing fees."
"The price of IBM Spectrum Protect is expensive and there is only a standard licensing fee."
"The different license models can give good benefits to the end customer."
"At scale, the consumption license (per TB) is very 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%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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 Enterprise95
 

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?
I do not know the current licensing cost for IBM Storage Protect and how we get our support because our licensing model is not quite standard. We do not buy IBM Storage Protect direct from IBM. We ...
What needs improvement with IBM Storage Protect?
IBM Storage Protect is from a previous generation of backup software. In those days, backup software was complex in setting up and complex to manage. The new software, such as Rubrik, is very easy ...
 

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: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.