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Bacula Enterprise vs Rubrik 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
Ranking in Cloud Backup
16th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Rubrik
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Backup
4th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
96
Ranking in other categories
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (5th)
 

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 Rubrik is 3.8%, down from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Rubrik3.8%
Bacula Enterprise1.1%
Other95.1%
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.
KB
Information Technology Specialist at LIGHTHOUSE DOCUMENT TECHNOLOGIES, INC
Technical support has improved my data management process but I encounter GUI and cost challenges
The solution is available in the Azure Marketplace, but approaching directly is more cost-effective. The Marketplace approach incurs additional platform and reporting costs. We initially built Rubrik at host level and DB level. We encountered latency issues when reverting back, with numerous snapshots available. This resulted in increased costs and occupied spaces. I performed manual deletion of snapshots and verified with the Rubrik team for confirmation. The GUI reporting functionality lacks flexibility. For instance, obtaining specific server reports considering drive space and backup quantities is not possible, as it only provides overall reporting.

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."
"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."
"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."
"Bacula is pretty stable."
"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."
"It is easy to deploy."
"The thing that sets Rubrik apart is the instant recovery feature."
"Rubrik has made the process to manage backup and recovery painless. This frees up more time to work on other projects."
"The most valuable feature has been the Live Mount feature."
"Live Mount is where we do the majority of our big recoveries, unless it is a file recovery. A file recovery takes a few minutes to restore to where the file in the event a file was accidentally deleted by a user, etc. There has been at least a 90 percent reduction in recovery time based on our previous solution, from the need to recover something to when it's actually recovered went from hours to minutes."
"The fact that the API is so available to us with the playground — there's an internal and public playground — is also valuable. We can write API calls — and although I'm sure there's a way we could hurt the data — we write those calls with a lot of certainty that we won't be destroying anything. We write these API calls using really easy mechanisms and generate automation a lot faster."
"Rubrik has led to improvement by reducing the amount of failed backups, leading to a reduced workload in IT operations."
"What I like about Rubrik is that you can back up to the cloud. It is a different kind of backup where you're not archiving the tape. Rubrik is a physical appliance. It is a dedicated appliance to which you can back up, and you can also back up to another device. So, you can back up to Rubrik and then to another device. If you have more than one site, you can set up Rubrik on site A and also on site B. You can back up to the Rubrik on site A and then replicate that data to the Rubrik on site B."
 

Cons

"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"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."
"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"We are looking for a unique interface that can rule both enterprise and open source editions. Such a thing does not yet exist."
"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."
"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."
"There are some corner cases where the Rubrik Connector (Agent) still doesn't work for our clients."
"It is not Windows Cluster-Aware at the moment or Exchange DAG-Aware. If they add support for these particular use cases, it would be even better."
"Portal identity management should improve."
"The dashboard and user interface could be improved to make them more user-friendly."
"It does not offer image-level backups for Hyper-V 2012."
"They should give more access to the backend capabilities. From a customer point of view, you do not have access to all the features on the system. You have to engage their support to perform some of the tasks. It would be helpful for an experienced engineer to be able to go and do some of those tasks prior to contacting the support."
"It would be nice if they could work on the pricing a bit."
"The deployment and configuration of the backup service is something that could be streamlined a little bit, particularly when you're trying to do a SQL workload. You have to install a backup service on the server. You only have to do it once and then you're done, but you have to do that on every server that you want to protect."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a perpetual license."
"This is an open-source solution."
"There are additional costs like maintenance, and there are some features on their central management piece that don't come with our licensing."
"The pricing has been quite good from our perspective, in terms of being able to negotiate with the Rubrik team to get the product that we want and be able to sell that out to our end customers."
"Rubrik's support is definitely on the expensive side, but I consider it to be top of the line. We incur no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."
"I don't remember the cost, but I know that for Veeam, we were spending almost $250,000 a year for 205 licenses. It was an enterprise version. When we purchased Rubrik, it was just a little bit more. It was not a terribly huge amount, and if I recall, that was for three years of support as well. So, Veeam priced itself out of the market at a certain point in time."
"We pay annually for the license for Rubrik. There are no additional costs. Initially, we needed to set it up, negotiate and finalize the offer."
"I rate the tool's pricing a six out of ten."
"We are on an annual license to use Rubrik and it is priced well."
"When we compared the overall costs, Rubrik was cheaper because the engineering and operational side required FAR LESS dedication. So, all in all, they actually were cheaper than the competition."
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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
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
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 Business23
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise55
 

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...
Which would you choose - Rubrik or Veeam Backup & Replication?
Veeam Backup & Replication provides an easy-to-set-up solution to the issue of data storage and recovery. Setting it up is a relatively simple affair. For the most part it prompts you from scre...
What do you like most about Rubrik?
It's easy to manage and has an innovated solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rubrik?
Regarding pricing, Rubrik is a costly solution, and I would rate it an eight.
 

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.
Driscoll's, Red Hawk Casino, Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, Wabash National, Chateau Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, Galliker Transport & Logistics
Find out what your peers are saying about Bacula Enterprise vs. Rubrik and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.