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Carbonite Server vs IBM Spectrum Protect Plus 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

Carbonite Server
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
56th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Backup (44th)
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
47th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Carbonite Server is 1.0%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is 1.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus1.1%
Carbonite Server1.0%
Other97.9%
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

CP
Backup, storage and disaster recovery technical specialist at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
A reliable backup product which needs little management
For most technical users the setup and initial deployment are fairly straightforward and once deployed it 99% of the time looks after itself. Installation of the agents is similar to most other products in that it has an install wizard to guide you, the accompanying documentation is also very useful to assist wherever you are in the agent install and policy setup process. Normally our customers' IT team does the deployment of agents, however, this isn't a daunting task unless you are dealing with multiple servers to protect the product. On a server-by-server basis, the deployment doesn't take long. From the MSP side of things, the infrastructure sitting behind the scenes doesn't take too much to install, configure and maintain.
AS
IT Specialist at Saudi Business Machines - SBM
Has provided straightforward backup and rapid deployment for diverse environments
There is reporting in IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, but I'm not very familiar with this area. I always concentrated on getting the customer to do the backup, restore, and related tasks, but there is reporting. IBM has made a decision to withdraw the product and replace it with IBM Data Protect. The correct direction is Data Protect, which includes ransomware detection. With IBM Data Protect, you can add more servers for backup. It's scalable, which is a key feature over Storage Protect and Storage Protect Plus, even more capable than Veritas, because Veritas has an option to make different media servers. You can scale the backup process regardless of the load of the customer. This speeds up the backup and restore process for a complete data center, which cannot be done with any other product. I rate IBM Spectrum Protect Plus 9 out of 10.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support handled all our issues quickly and effectively."
"The Granular Restore of SQL feature has been a lifesaver more times than I can count. One of the main reasons for looking at Carbonite was their support for platforms like AIX and AS/400 Series."
"I find the BMR/image and the recovery pieces are valuable."
"The Granular Restore of SQL feature has been a lifesaver more times than I can count."
"Easy verification of things is the most valuable feature."
"The solution is a free engine to help work with the container."
"The solution is very stable."
"This solution is very simple to use and I will recommend it to anybody."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of use."
"The speed of restoring from a system backup is very quick, and their ability to restore a system very quickly, within a backup window, is one of the reasons that we chose this product."
"IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is a good investment."
"The most valuable feature is how we can easily power speed up the VM even though the VM resides in remote storage."
"The tool has enough documentation; you don't need to contact the support team."
"The solution's stability is high because it is derived from Spectrum Protect."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is its ease of use, and it does backups of all of the things we need, such as OS, files, and databases."
"When we need support, IBM is there."
 

Cons

"They do not yet have USB recovery but they are adding it in coming releases."
"In the next release I would like to see an improvement in the auto failover option."
"The support for object storage isn't quite there yet. Its public cloud support can be improved. I would love to see the public cloud support for object storage, and it would be great, but what I always hear from the folks at Carbonite is that in a lot of cases, it directly competes with their cloud offering. So, I don't know when or where that will go or if that will go anywhere, but we are hopeful to see something. The dashboard is a little outdated. If they gave it a facelift and put some better design around their dashboard, that would be tremendous. I generally care less about the visual aesthetics of an application as long as it does what it needed to do, which is true in the case of this solution. We also have the Microsoft 365 platform. Because they're two separate platforms, I have to log in to my Microsoft platform to manage it, and I have to log into my Carbonite server backup platform to manage it. Having these two coexist together in one management console is really what we're looking for, but we went for it knowing this. We also knew that there would be some integration coming down the road. So, we're again hoping to see some of that coming in 2021."
"The Hyper-V backup has room for improvement."
"The stability has room for improvement."
"When you have to restore it, Carbonite takes a lot of time."
"The support for object storage isn't quite there yet; its public cloud support can be improved."
"They do not yet have USB recovery but they are adding it in coming releases."
"There could be better integration with Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus, it should be one solution."
"The backup support for IBM Power Virtualization needs to be added."
"Not particularly user friendly."
"I would not recommend this solution to others because there are far better solutions on the market."
"The security must be improved."
"With ransomware protection and cyber protection, more improvement is possible."
"It still needs to grow and add new features. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, I believe, requires time to become competitive due to a weakness in the other software products."
"An area that needs improvement is data validation. We currently use another product that gives us immediate validation, information about when the last backup was, and no risk of corruption happening."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is open source."
"Its price is reasonable."
"The pricing is between $120 and $150 per year."
"We pay 9,000 dollars per year for our license."
"The price is lower than that of some competing products."
"IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is a little expensive."
"I rate the price of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus a one on a scale of one to ten, where one is extremely expensive, and ten is very cheap."
"The solution is too expensive."
"Depends on the licensing options that you choose."
"In addition to the standard licensing fees, we paid for implementation and training."
"There are a few options available for purchasing the solutions. Overall, the price of the is high."
"There is an annual license required to use IBM Spectrum Protect Plus. The cost of the license could improve, it is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise1
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus?
Pricing is good; it is reasonable and more reasonable than any other vendors.
What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus?
IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is very simple to deploy for us, but for more clients or competitors, the solution is hard to deploy and to integrate. For our team, deployment of IBM Spectrum Protect Plu...
What is your primary use case for IBM Spectrum Protect Plus?
We are an IT integrator and we need to have a good vision of all recovery and backup recovery solutions. Most frequently, we use Veeam Backup. We use Cohesity. For some old workloads, we use IBM TS...
 

Also Known As

Carbonite Recover Backup
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

INLINE Commercial Construction, Hamilton County
PT Wings Surya, Tectrade, State of Ohio
Find out what your peers are saying about Carbonite Server vs. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.