Bacula Enterprise vs N-able Cove Data Protection comparison

Bacula Systems and N-able are both solutions in the Cloud Backup category. Bacula Systems is ranked #16 with an average rating of 10.0, while N-able is ranked #18 with an average rating of 7.5. Bacula Systems holds a 1.7% mindshare in CB, compared to N-able’s 1.9% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Bacula Systems users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of N-able users who would recommend it.

Bacula Enterprise

Read 10 Bacula Enterprise reviews

3,340 Views
1,971 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

N-able Cove Data Protection

Read 23 N-able Cove Data Protection reviews

4,523 Views
2,533 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Bacula Enterprise

N-able Cove Data Protection

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Bacula Enterprise and N-able Cove Data Protection are both prominent backup solutions. Bacula Enterprise tends to have the upper hand in customization and flexibility, while N-able Cove Data Protection excels in user-friendly features and integration with other N-able products.

Features: Bacula Enterprise offers powerful configuration options, extensive scripting capabilities, and advanced customization. N-able Cove Data Protection is praised for its seamless product integration, comprehensive reporting tools, and user-friendly design.

Room for Improvement: Bacula Enterprise could improve its documentation, simplify its configuration process, and address its complexity. N-able Cove Data Protection could benefit from robust alerting mechanisms, additional third-party integrations, and enhancements in extensibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Bacula Enterprise’s deployment is intricate, requiring extensive knowledge, but offers excellent customer support. N-able Cove Data Protection is noted for its straightforward deployment process and efficient customer service with a lesser depth in support documentation.

Pricing and ROI: Bacula Enterprise is valued for its cost-effectiveness and strong ROI due to its open-source model, appealing to budget-conscious enterprises. N-able Cove Data Protection, despite its higher cost, provides good ROI through extensive feature integration, justifying its price for many users.

To learn more, read our detailed Bacula Enterprise vs. N-able Cove Data Protection Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Bacula Enterprise vs. N-able Cove Data Protection

March 2026

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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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

N-able Cove Data Protection

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

34th

Ranking in Cloud Backup

18th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

SaaS Backup (8th), MSP Backup (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Cloud Backup category, the mindshare of Bacula Enterprise is 1.7%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of N-able Cove Data Protection is 1.9%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Backup Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Bacula Enterprise	1.7%
N-able Cove Data Protection	1.9%
Other	96.4%

Cloud Backup

Featured Reviews

Davilson Aguiar

Analista Tecnologia Banco de Dados at Centro de Gestão da Tecnologia da Informação

Very cost-effective and well organized with good compression

It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company. A managerial user who wants more information beyond the operational technician should be able to access it. It could include greater transparency regarding the volume of data trafficked on the network, as well as the expectation of deduplication. A more practical strategy could come with a backup policy model as a suggestion for both large and small companies. A simple suggestion is to visually implement the backup time as far as your physical media.

Read full review

Per MøllerJacobsen

Senior consultant at Azend A/S

Delivers cost-effective data backup with room for search improvements

The challenges I face especially are those I've mentioned, that finding some specific data in N-able Cove Data Protection is not as easy as it is in some other systems. You cannot just search for something—you need to know where it was and when it was there to restore it, plus it would be nice to take out data from Microsoft 365 in some portable format, which is currently not an option. I would like to extract the data from Microsoft 365 in a portable format, something like a database or maybe just to take out a PST file or SharePoint and Teams files to the file system. Especially in these times, where we discuss potential risks with the Microsoft cloud for European companies, companies would want to know how to access their data from the backup if they suddenly don't have a tenant. I believe there should be the ability to take out data from Microsoft 365 in a portable format. I know that Cohesity is working on making such a thing. It's not there yet; I asked last week for something for forensics, and the support team said it's not possible yet, but I know from our technical account manager they are working on some solutions.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."

"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."

"Bacula is pretty stable."

"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."

"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."

"It works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."

"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."

"The monitoring makes it very easy to check whether a backup has gone bad."

"The ease of use and the console are great."

"It provides a single dashboard for all types of data protection, we monitor everything through a single dashboard. It simplifies everything overall. It allows us to see everything, whether passing or failing any issues, any problems through a single pane of glass that we don't have to click through or adjust as we go forward."

"The most valuable feature of N-able Cove Data Protection is its ease of use."

"The most valuables feature is the alerts and monitoring that catches the failed backups."

"We use a neat feature called VDR status, Virtual Disaster Recovery status. It only works on servers... It's automated. Once or twice a month it will virtually mount the backup and provide a screenshot and advise whether or not there have been any errors."

"I know I won't have an issue if the data is there. The reliability and the confidence that we have is amazing. It doesn't matter. We've had customers have ransomware. We've had customers that have had corruption. We've had customers that have had employees destroy their data. As long as it's been backed up, I know that I can get it back and I know I have nothing to worry about. Our confidence level is very high."

"The integration of N-able Cove Data Protection into our existing infrastructure is easy."

More N-able Cove Data Protection pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."

"The initial setup could be a bit easier."

"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."

"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."

"This solution is not very good for image restores, mainly just files. The solution also does not allow you to enable or disable backups. Sometimes, our users will connect via mobile device and it will use their data to perform the backup. If they were able to enable and disable the backup, they would not have this issue."

"A better default view on my dashboard would be great. There is a lot of useless information there that it pulls up. They could present the dashboard slightly better, in terms of the extra information after the first five columns. The first five columns are awesome. After that, I don't care about the rest, and there are another seven things after that."

"An area for improvement that would really work out well would be if there were a little bit more of an elegant handshake relationship between SolarWinds RMM and the PCs that are being backed up, to advise regarding "up" status... Since RMM is an agent that feeds back that a machine is alive and on, I don't see any reason why they can't either tap into that one feature or build the same exact polling within the backup agent, to update right away and say the system is online or offline."

"For small amounts of data, recovery is easy, but when it's large amounts of data, it takes forever. So, if they can have a service where they put our data on a hard drive and ship it to us as fast as possible, it would be great. Even if there's a fee associated with it, it's fine."

"There aren’t any challenges. Regarding the additional features, Cove is limited to disaster recovery with Azure. It would be great to make disaster recovery compatible with AWS."

"Integration with a hybrid cloud is something that I found complicated."

"N-able Cove Data Protection does not provide a lot of SaaS backup products, which is an area they can improve. Additionally, there are some limitations on the storage side, where I cannot have a lot of employees backing up their data."

"A disaster recovery console would be an improvement for the product."

More N-able Cove Data Protection cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a perpetual license."

"This is an open-source solution."

"The cost is around ten dollars per workstation a month and that includes a certain amount of data."

"N-able Cove Data Protection is an averagely-priced product."

"Cove only takes the data you have on the physical server. I can back that up for long periods of time, and I don't accrue high charges to have the data in the cloud. It stays at one rate. This allows me to forecast payment for the next one or two years and show clients their estimated growth."

"The only option I would like to see is an adjustable scale. Right now we have 250 seats and we're not using all of them. It would be nice to be able to save that little bit of money by being able to buy just what we need."

"The pricing, for now, is good. The package that they gave us recently is pretty good. It depends on how many clients you have, and you pay for certain terabytes per license. These terabytes, if not used, are pooled together."

"The pricing is very competitive and it's well worth the price."

"The pricing is affordable. N-able Cove Data Protection has a direct-to-cloud architecture, but it also allows saving backups locally without extra storage costs."

"The pricing of SolarWinds seems to be fair compared to the rest of the industry."

More N-able Cove Data Protection pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

University

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	19
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	1

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Bacula Enterprise?

Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for N-able Backup?

In terms of pricing, N-able Cove Data Protection is neither cheap nor expensive compared to other competitors.

See all answers

What needs improvement with N-able Backup?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for N-able Backup?

Our main use cases for enabling N-able Cove Data Protection include backing up our customers' data on servers hosted in data centers and servers hosted in our own data center, as well as a few onsi...

See all answers

Comparisons

Bareos vs Bacula Enterprise

Compared 19% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Bacula Enterprise

Compared 8% of the time

UrBackup vs Bacula Enterprise

Compared 6% of the time

QNAP Backup Solution vs Bacula Enterprise

Compared 5% of the time

Dell PowerProtect Data Domain vs Bacula Enterprise

Compared 4% of the time

More Bacula Enterprise Competitors

Veeam Data Platform vs N-able Cove Data Protection

Compared 6% of the time

Synology C2 Backup vs N-able Cove Data Protection

Compared 4% of the time

Boxafe vs N-able Cove Data Protection

Compared 3% of the time

Azure Backup vs N-able Cove Data Protection

Compared 3% of the time

Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 vs N-able Cove Data Protection

Compared 3% of the time

More N-able Cove Data Protection Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Backup and Recovery

February 2026

Download Bacula Enterprise product report

Buyer's Guide

N-able Cove Data Protection

March 2026

Download N-able Cove Data Protection product report

Also Known As

No data available

N-able Backup, SolarWinds Backup, SolarWinds MSP Backup & Recovery, SolarWinds MSP Backup

Overview

Bacula Enterprise is a highly scalable, especially robust and secure data backup and recovery software. Its unique low cost subscription model empowers data centers to truly escape data volume price traps. With a high degree of flexibility and customizability, Bacula offers native integration with a wide range of hypervisors, databases, file systems, cloud interfaces and containers. High numbers of enterprise organizations worldwide (incl. NASA, Bank of Austria, Swisscom or Sky PLC) have adopted Bacula Enterprise backup software in mission critical environments because of its advanced features and ability to handle high data volume at very low cost.

Bacula Systems

Cove Data Protection, from N-able, is a comprehensive solution designed to safeguard critical business data. It offers a range of features including backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and endpoint protection. With automated backups and flexible scheduling options, it ensures data is protected and easily recoverable.

The solution also includes advanced security measures such as encryption and ransomware detection to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches. Cove Data Protection provides seamless integration with various platforms and offers centralized management for efficient monitoring and control.

With its user-friendly interface and robust capabilities, Cove Data Protection is an ideal choice for businesses seeking reliable data protection.

N-able

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.

Computer Depot, Leading Edge Computers, IT Logic Australia

Buyer's Guide

Bacula Enterprise vs. N-able Cove Data Protection

March 2026

Free Report: Bacula Enterprise vs. N-able Cove Data Protection

Find out what your peers are saying about Bacula Enterprise vs. N-able Cove Data Protection and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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