Cohesity DataProtect vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

Cohesity and IBM are both solutions in the Backup and Recovery category. Cohesity is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.3, while IBM is ranked #14 with an average rating of 7.3. Cohesity holds a 3.3% mindshare in BRS, compared to IBM’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Cohesity users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Cohesity DataProtect

Read 74 Cohesity DataProtect reviews

6,845 Views
4,445 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Protect

Read 149 IBM Spectrum Protect reviews

3,421 Views
2,509 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Cohesity DataProtect

IBM Spectrum Protect

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

IBM Spectrum Protect and Cohesity DataProtect are two leading data protection solutions. Cohesity DataProtect has the upper hand due to its flexibility and innovative features, though IBM Spectrum Protect has robust, time-tested capabilities.

Features: IBM Spectrum Protect offers comprehensive backup and recovery options, scalability, and integration with various platforms. Cohesity DataProtect provides cloud-native capabilities, simplified data management, and a modern approach to data protection.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Protect needs better integration with modern cloud services, enhanced ease of use, and modernized functionalities. Cohesity DataProtect requires more mature reporting tools, performance optimization for large datasets, and further polishing of existing features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Spectrum Protect deployment can be complex and time-consuming, with customer service satisfactory but needing quicker response times. Cohesity DataProtect offers a smoother, quicker deployment experience and proactive, responsive support, making it more attractive for users prioritizing ease of use and support.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Protect has higher upfront costs, with long-term reliability and performance justifying the expense for some users. Cohesity DataProtect is cost-effective with a quicker ROI due to efficient resource utilization and lower initial setup costs, generally perceived as delivering better value for its price.

To learn more, read our detailed Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

June 2025

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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

Cohesity DataProtect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

8th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Backup (8th)

IBM Spectrum Protect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

149

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Cohesity DataProtect is 3.3%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

Giovanni Golinelli.

Hybrid IT Architect at Quanture Spa

Easy to use, offers good scalability and responsive support

The deployment depends on the environment. Deploying on VMs is relatively simple. But for most of our customers, we implement physical clusters with at least three configured hosts using the existing model. So, it depends on the setup. Implementing DataProtect itself wasn't particularly challenging. One key requirement for successful DataProtect deployment is proper network configuration. If the network setup isn't right, you won't achieve optimal performance. We have developed a service for some of our customers where they implement an appliance or physical cluster of Cohesity at the customer site. Then, we use cloud clustering to replicate, and even in production, a second copy of the protected data. And in some cases, we have developed some disaster recovery procedures using Cohesity.

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Syed Habib

Head of Infrastructure Security (S.A.V.P) at EXIM Bank Ltd

Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking

It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.

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

"Cohesity DataProtect is more of a unified solution, which is also trying to expand for ransomware protection."

"Instead of four different solutions for protecting VMs, physical servers, SQL, and NAS, we now have one solution with Cohesity that is lightning fast and has amazing features."

"The most valuable features are the rapid VM restores and the ability to quickly find files and download them directly to my desktop so that I can put them where I need them to be."

"We like that we can use production data to run intensive reports that would otherwise bog down the production server."

"Its most valuable feature is its ransomware protection, so it has immutable backups."

"The ease of use and the GUI have really been most valuable to us. Configuring the system to do what we need is simple and straight forward and a lot of guesswork has been removed. One of my favorite features with Cohesity is Kroll for Exchange item-level recovery. The software is simple to use and fast."

"Cohesity's web-scale architecture enables us to scale up as needed."

"The dashboard is very easy to use."

More Cohesity DataProtect pros

"Because of the flexible parameters, everything can be fine-tuned to the customers’ needs in their environment."

"Regarding technical support, if one has the entire enterprise support, I would rate it a nine out of ten...Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten."

"by backing up only the changed data, we average around 75TB per night. If we had to do full backups, even occasionally, we would not be able to complete the backup within 12 hours, or we would have to make a large investment to fit a full backup within the 12 hour window."

"We can scale. Today, we have an average backup volume of 100TB a day."

"The scalability of IBM Spectrum Protect is good."

"Space efficient data reduction, using progressive incremental forever in combination with deduplication and compression."

"One of the main things that I like about IBM is the versioning of the data - meaning that we can have multiple versions of a file or directory of a server."

"Everyone wants a full backup. It gives them safety and peace of mind, like an insurance policy for that rainy day when they may need to restore a system."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pros

Cons

"I like that Cohesity offers the chance to have data on-premises and on the cloud. All the data is automatically sent to the cloud."

"Reporting is quite limited and not customizable."

"Cohesity cluster upgrades have not been as easy as a single button click. They are a manual process that requires upgrading each node into a cluster individually."

"A little more documentation on standard faults would help, as new features are being released quite often."

"They could always keep up with continuous interface refinements."

"Better documentation is needed because the lack of information has necessitated having our team depend more heavily on Cohesity support."

"The tool could benefit from further improvements in AI features, particularly in areas such as a generative AI chat interface. This feature could help answer queries about the data being protected. One feature that would greatly improve our experience with the product is the ability to identify data redundancies through a central console. This feature would help us reduce storage costs by managing redundant data."

"Many of the reports are basic, at most, and at times we had to open a support ticket to help find or develop a report for our needs."

More Cohesity DataProtect cons

"I want a better user interface, support, and integrations."

"The administration tools for GI need improvement, as the current assessment suggests shortcomings in the back-end system."

"I want to see better compression than what it currently does."

"It could use single store. The ability to mark an archive from my backup for long-term retention."

"Easier configuration of some of the products, e.g., VE comes to mind."

"We have had some problems about using storage agents on the X6 environment. It is not quite stable, but it is also not supported in a virtualized environment."

"Integration with Windows environments needs improvement. It should be more "assisted", both at the application and database level. It remains a product that fits better in Unix/Linux environments than in Windows environments, given its configuration procedures."

"Its price can be better. It is very expensive. Its interface is very old and not user friendly. They can improve its interface. Their support can also be better. My clients are not very satisfied with the support because they are not really quick."

More IBM Spectrum Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Sizing is important and it is easy to overestimate."

"The solution's pricing is in the mid-range, where it's neither costly nor cheap."

"The ROI is huge. Not really measurable at this point, but the price of the unit was a fraction of what a couple hours of downtime could result in."

"Licensing is per node and per protected terabyte. You will also pay 10-15% annually for support."

"There is monthly licensing."

"Cohesity came in at the best price. Setup was included and done in half a day."

"My advice is to always negotiate for better pricing."

"We purchased support from Cohesity to ensure that should we face an issue, we don't have to deal with different service providers."

More Cohesity DataProtect pricing and cost advice

"The solution is not cheap."

"One can go with either a PVU licensing model or a capacity based licensing model. Either solution does not block the usage, if over used."

"IBM Spectrum Protect can be considered an averagely-priced product."

"Technical support is pretty good. It is doing fine, but you pay for it."

"It is very scalable, but the downside is that it costs money."

"It can be perceived as expensive since it is designed for enterprise use."

"Customers need to pay for licensing in order to use IBM Spectrum Protect. The customers that have been using it for a long time are okay and happy with it. From a cost point of view, it's better for them to renew their licenses than to go through the difficult process of changing a backup product in their environment, and migrate from one product to another."

"That's no longer my department, but I have some past experience with licensing. It is not cheap. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of licensing. In terms of additional costs, there is management overhead. It is a complex solution and a lot of work goes into managing clients. It has gotten better over the years, but compared to its competitor, it is still heavy on management overhead."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

22%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cohesity DataProtect?

Several features enable us to perform fast recovery, such as instant fast recovery. All our virtual machines protected with the product can be quickly restored to another healthy environment with m...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cohesity DataProtect?

I find Cohesity DataProtect to be expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cohesity DataProtect?

What areas have room for improvement? Is there anything that could be simplified to make it better?

See all answers

What do you like most about IBM Spectrum Protect?

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Protect?

It's expensive. I acknowledge the cost associated with it.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?

One point for improvement for IBM Spectrum Protect is security, as IBM has not been investing as much as in the past. There is a need for additional layers of security to fill the gaps, which is wh...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 6% of the time

HPE Zerto Software vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 2% of the time

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Veeam Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 15% of the time

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 15% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 12% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 10% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cohesity DataProtect

June 2025

Download Cohesity DataProtect product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Protect

June 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Protect product report

Also Known As

Cohesity

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Overview

What is Cohesity DataProtect?

Cohesity DataProtect is a top-level, sophisticated, software-defined backup and recovery solution created for cloud environments. Cohesity DataProtect is made to hyperscale and is one the most thorough policy-based protection solutions available on the market today.

Cohesity DataProtect melds multiple-point products into a single software that is able to be deployed as on-premise or consumed as a service.

Top Features:

Hyperscale made easy: Cohesity DataProtect improves data protection by doing away with the need for backup silos and administers backup and recovery with a single user-friendly, easy-to-understand interface. Cohesity DataProtect provides extensive 24/7 enterprise-class protection for a large, varying set of sources, including virtual and physical servers, NAS and SaaS workloads, relational and distributed databases, and traditional and containerized applications.

Super fast recovery: Cohesity DataProtect offers near-zero recovery point objectives (RPOs) and near-instant recovery time objectives (RTOs) to satisfy your business service-level agreements (SLAs). Using Cohesity Helios’ unified data plane and control plane you can immediately search and recover data on any Cohesity cluster, located anywhere. DataProtect distinctively minimizes downtime by immediately mass restoring any amount of virtual machines (VMs) to any point in time, and lowers data protection costs by as much as 70% or more.

Backup as a Service: Feel free to take advantage of the elasticity of the public cloud and the cost-effective value of Cohesity DataProtect when delivered as a service. When you choose an OPEX option, you can eliminate the need for on-premises hardware. There is a SaaS option that will allow you to very simply configure your backup workloads and immediately begin protecting your vital all-important data and applications.

It’s as easy as: sign-up, connect, and protect!

Ransomware protection: Cohesity DataProtect offers stellar recovery at scale. The solution is so intuitive, it has machine learning-based anomaly detection to stop incidents before they happen. Cohesity DataProtection can provide immutable backups, Datalock write once, read many (WORM), encryption, and role-based access control (RBAC).

Cohesity DataProtect integrates well with many of today’s top solutions, including, but not limited to:

Hypervisors: VMware vSphere (5.5 and later), Microsoft Hyper-V (2019, 2016, 2012 R2), Nutanix AHV and RHeV

Kubernetes-based data and application state

Cloud: AWS EC2, Amazon RDS, Azure VM, and Google Compute

Physical: Windows, Linux(RHEL, CentOS, OEL, Debian, Ubuntu), AIX (7.x), and Solaris

Databases: Oracle (11g R2, 12c), Oracle RAC and SQL (2008 or later)

Distributed Databases (NoSQL and Hadoop): MongoDB, CouchbaseDB, Apache, Cassandra, Cloudera, and Hortonworks.

Bare Machine Recovery: Windows and Linux

Applications: MS Exchange (2010 SP3 or later), MSFT Active Directory, Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, Groups), SalesForce (SFDC), and SAP HANA

Primary storage: Pure FlashArray, HPE Nimble, and Cisco Hyperflex

NAS: Pure FlashBlade, NetApp, Isilon, IBM GPFS, Google EFS, Elastifile, and generic solutions*

Reviews from Real Users

One reviewer, who is head of IT infrastructure at Kampmann says, “Cohesity really is a Next-Gen Data Management Software,” and goes on to indicate that Cohesity “works flawlessly with easy replication of backups and numerous supported backup sources.”

Another user, who is a senior network engineer at a legal firm, relates that "Cohesity is a robust and feature-rich solution"

Cohesity

IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) family. It enables reliable, cost effective backups and fast recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.

IBM

Sample Customers

Tribune Media

CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology

Buyer's Guide

Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

June 2025

Free Report: Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

Find out what your peers are saying about Cohesity DataProtect vs. IBM Spectrum Protect and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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