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Bacula Enterprise vs Oracle Data Guard 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)
Oracle Data Guard
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
23rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
32
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 Oracle Data Guard is 0.9%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle Data Guard0.9%
Bacula Enterprise1.1%
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.
AdnanNaseem - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal DB A at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Active data protection has ensured high availability and supports seamless reporting workloads
In my opinion, Active Data Guard is the most valuable feature. We use the secondary side for reporting purposes, which reduces the load on the primary side. Oracle Data Guard includes functions such as automatic failover, but we use manual managed failover. After some months, we converted our primary to secondary and secondary to primary. Oracle Data Guard is effective in minimizing data loss and provides a good solution for that. The main benefits of Oracle Data Guard include minimizing data loss during a production failure. It is used for maximum availability when paired with Oracle RAC, so if any disruption occurs, we have an alternative Data Guard to convert our load to the disaster recovery site. Oracle Data Guard maintains a high level of data integrity by using archive logs. When a transaction happens, redo logs create archive logs, which are then applied on the disaster recovery side, ensuring that both databases are synchronized.

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 pretty stable."
"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."
"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 solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."
"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."
"The solution is really very stable. One good thing about it, compared to other products, is that you can just run it and forget about it. Unless you come across some interruptions in the network, it works like a charm."
"It is a top-notch product, super stable, making it our go-to for internal operations."
"It's a very good solution if you want to protect your data across two data centers, or you have a middle man or many administrators who use these solutions for protecting their data. It's very reliable compared to other solutions that are most often not storage-based."
"The most valuable features are the backup and restore. With this in place along with the clustering, the database is safe from hacking, hardware failure, power failures, and system crashes."
"If you have a problem with your primary site and can't access your primary database, you can continue working with the database that you have as standby on the other site, by changing its role to primary."
"The solution can scale as needed."
"We use Data Guard for online replication from data center, to data center for high availability. This is the most important feature."
"Data Guard also improved because customers with an active Data Guard license want to reduce the I/O in a production environment. Some application complaints to it for Oracle reporting purposes. It has a production environment that needs to be enhanced."
 

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."
"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."
"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."
"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"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."
"The implementation is complex for anyone who's jumping into it without any experience. It's all command-line driven implementations. For some, that's a turn-off."
"I think it would be great to have a graphical interface assistant (like DBCA, ASMCA, NETCA, etc.) for initial configuration, monitoring, configuring Oracle Data Guard Broker and all the Data Guard Broker commands, without needing Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control installed."
"The usage of block storage devices in the cloud or migration of a type of storage from one site to another site can be improved. Currently, we have to use multi-node to single node because of the lack of storage support on the Azure side. It did not really work. Our DBA had to spend a lot of time tweaking the Data Guard tools, or the underlying Oracle VMs, to make sure that Data Guard would run on top of different types of storage. So, if it can support transporting or getting from one type of storage to another type of storage in a different site or a different technology, it would be very helpful."
"The database administration needs improvement. With Oracle, we have a lot of features for administrating data, but it might be too many. It needs to be simplified. It should be automated. Looking at Enterprise Manager, there are too many KPIs in place."
"The initial setup is complex."
"For every standby server you have, you must pay a licensing fee, which is the main disadvantage."
"The pricing of the solution is quite high. They should do what they can to bring it down so that it is more reasonable for customers like us."
"Oracle could be improved by the ability to manage it on the cloud. This on-premises version is secure and reliable, but I'm sure that they will soon provide a cloud solution that will be even better. In one to two years, we will probably move to the cloud—we have already moved to the cloud with Microsoft Exchange, but our databases are still on-premises. I would prefer managing a cloud version of Oracle."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a perpetual license."
"This is an open-source solution."
"​Oracle Data Guard is a feature available only in Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, and is available for extra cost."
"The cost is expensive."
"The licensing cost is significantly high."
"It is not a cheap product, but if you look at the price, features, availability, scalability, and maturity, it is a very good product."
"This is the best solution if you want something similar that's less expensive than Oracle Grid."
"The cost of the Oracle license will depend on the negotiations with Oracle."
"It's a cost-effective solution."
"The pricing is on the higher side."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
 

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 Business7
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise22
 

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 advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?
Ik fluister:VM Host Oracle en DataGuard hebben we per toeval vervangen door Zerto :-) tijdens de Zerto implementatie en VPG werden de Host Data in write-ack Block-Level gerepliceerd. Qua licentie 1...
What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?
It is a very useful administrative IT tool. It saves on costs. I strongly recommend Data Guard. I've been using it for eight years and I would strongly recommend it. I'd rate Oracle Data Guard a se...
What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?
We're Oracle partners. We've worked with databases 11G and 12C. If a company is planning to implement Oracle solutions, I would suggest they also implement Data Guard. I'd rate the solution nine ou...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Active Data Guard
 

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.
Athenahealth, Discover Financial Services
Find out what your peers are saying about Bacula Enterprise vs. Oracle Data Guard and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.