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Bacula Enterprise vs NetApp SnapCenter 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
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Backup (16th)
NetApp SnapCenter
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
42nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Bacula Enterprise is 1.1%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp SnapCenter is 0.9%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Bacula Enterprise1.1%
NetApp SnapCenter0.9%
Other98.0%
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Davilson  Aguiar - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
SaneeshC - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. engineer at Sify Technologies
Has reduced backup time for large workloads and supports smooth workload migration
Role-based access control and multi-factor authentication are security features available in NetApp SnapCenter. The one-time password comes to our multi-factor authentication tool; we work with Cisco Duo, and that OTP is generated through that tool, which we use to access the device. There are different options through which we can migrate workloads without downtime. The user interface is very easy to handle and not complicated. There are multiple features that make NetApp SnapCenter valuable. In case of any job failure, we get an alert over email. For jobs replicating from site A to site B, we know how long it will take to complete that replication. All that information is available in the console, and there aren't any difficulties or objections that need to be improved.

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."
"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 can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"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."
"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."
"I like the instant backups and recovery feature that SnapCenter provides within NetApp storage systems."
"It allows us to easily take a Snapshot and use it with any backup tools. We can also take Snapshots on the application side. We can also take Snapshots on the application side. If we want to restore an SAP or an Oracle machine, a normal Snapshot won't do it, but we can do so with SnapCenter."
"While Commvault took two to three days to complete jobs, especially with VM sizes above 8 TB or 10 TB, the same workload configured for NetApp SnapCenter completes in a few seconds."
"The support from NetApp is very good, and I would rate it as ten points."
"The centralized GUI is the best feature, that there is only one webpage where we can see the states of all the backup jobs. We can see all the tasks that are running and we can quickly see if one fails; if they are running or have any issues. We have all that in one place."
"Being able to add everything in as resource groups is a valuable feature... Having all the SQL servers put into specific buckets, based on their year of release - 2008, 2012, 2014 - allows us to get almost immediate backups that are easily seen and reported on."
"What is very handy for our clients is the consolidated view. They have a dashboard with everything, through a single pane of glass. This is what they really need because, within seconds, they can have a good overview and see if there are any errors or any issues."
"It has very fast backup and can handle a huge amount of data. It also enables really fast recovery."
 

Cons

"We are looking for a unique interface that can rule both enterprise and open source editions. Such a thing does not yet exist."
"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."
"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."
"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."
"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."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."
"When you have role-based access, for example, it's a bit of a problem that the person who creates the backup job is the owner of it. We are struggling a bit with this, that everyone has the same view and the same permissions in there."
"The tool could be faster."
"The UI, the User Interface, needs to be improved. It's not as clean or modern as it could be."
"The interface usability needs improvement. It should be more user-friendly and easier for customers to use."
"The Dashboard view needs to be more compressed with better ease of access and drill-down features. They should also reinstate Linux filesystem backups of storage volumes (which existed in the prior version)."
"Some of the minor functionalities from SnapManager did not transfer over to SnapCenter. These should be added in future releases."
"Groups might be helpful for each site or data center so that we know a given data center has these resources while another data center has those resources. It's not always easy to group hosts by type."
"We tend to have a lot of Hyper-V... so now we have two management consoles and we would ideally like to leverage SnapCenter to include Hyper-V."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."
"We have a perpetual license."
"The product is inexpensive."
"We see a financial value with SnapCenter because we don't have to license Commvault, which is pretty expensive."
"The license for SnapCenter was included with the storage array."
"We have a site license, so it comes with the product."
"Pricing is very good because if you already have NepApp controllers, then it's included."
"The licensing is well-designed because it's already included in some packages with NetApp storage. Therefore, for most customers, it's okay as the SnapCenter license is already included in some NetApp bundles."
"It comes free with the amount of equipment we purchase from NetApp. In terms of pricing, zero is my favorite number."
"It's free. The license is included with other NetApp products."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
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 Business8
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise12
 

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 NetApp SnapCenter?
The product team handles the commercial aspects of pricing.
What needs improvement with NetApp SnapCenter?
We have not started much with the automation capability in NetApp SnapCenter. Regarding the integration aspect, I am not certain about its complexity, as this was built by the OEM NetApp team.
What is your primary use case for NetApp SnapCenter?
The major use case for NetApp SnapCenter is that our customer previously used Commvault. For huge VMs with sizes of five TB or 10 TB, taking the file level backup in Commvault took a long time, oft...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SnapCenter
 

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.
All for One Steeb AG, Accenture
Find out what your peers are saying about Bacula Enterprise vs. NetApp SnapCenter and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.