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Dell PowerPath vs NetApp ONTAP comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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

Dell PowerPath
Ranking in Storage Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp ONTAP
Ranking in Storage Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
93
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Storage Software category, the mindshare of Dell PowerPath is 16.5%, up from 15.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp ONTAP is 20.5%, down from 35.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Storage Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetApp ONTAP20.5%
Dell PowerPath16.5%
Other63.0%
Storage Software
 

Featured Reviews

Derrick Brockel - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager of Operations at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
A resilient and reliable solution that has many load-balancing technologies and provides high availability
People who want to buy the solution must create a scorecard of Dell PowerPath against other products. They must run database tests. They must consider factors like pricing, performance, ease of use, visibility, and reliability. They must also run tests to understand which product recovers faster. Overall, I rate the tool an eight out of ten.
BK
Senior Storage Engineer at Shell
Data management and availability improve operations, but cost and support need attention
For snapshots, there should be something similar to a recycle bin. When someone mistakenly deletes a snapshot, it should be stored for about two days before disappearing from the system. Regarding storage optimization, when purchasing a 10 terabyte disk, after formatting, you can only use approximately 8 terabytes. They should improve this so users can utilize 90% instead of 80% of the disk space. The support response needs improvement, especially for P1 cases. When critical cases are raised, they should ensure they call the customer and follow up properly. Comparing NetApp ONTAP to other solutions such as EMC, the cost of contract renewals and warranties is relatively expensive. They should extend their renewal window beyond the current six months to one year options. A longer warranty period of two years for new systems, controllers, or filers would be beneficial. Overall, they should reduce subscription costs for businesses.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This multipathing software has certain features which we normally don't have on native multipathing software, especially in terms of load balancing and the way it captures the IO metrics and boosts the performance of different operating systems."
"The product is very reliable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is migration without disruptions."
"The solution has improved our performance, reliability, and redundancy."
"We have found the solution to be quite flexible and very scalable."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that disaster recovery scenarios are very good and easy to use in Dell PowerPath since it is available in a simplified form."
"The user interface is good."
"OS-aware multipathing is a valuable feature of the product."
"The most valuable feature is the throughput. You tend to get to your data very quickly. That's why we decided, eventually, to move into NetApp, because of the speed. Also, as a support engineer, this solution is easy to use, compared with SAN storage."
"It's very fast, NetApp is always dependable, so if we have an issue, they're very responsive."
"The product is good at deduplication. Also, the new automation feature is good, as it saves us a lot of time."
"Scalability is awesome with a cluster node, not only can you scale up, but you can also scale out."
"The moment you start using it is when the magic happens."
"Scalability is good. Now that we have the ability to add more nodes to the cluster, it's better. It allows us to grill our clusters allowing them to be larger and faster, without having to buy a whole new system."
"The solution has helped our organization reduce its overall cost of storage by allowing us to have multiple sites using the multi-tenant security model, segregated from each other, while at the same time using the same resources."
"Data protection is essential. When we had power-related issues and the storage box went off abruptly, we were able to recover without much challenge or corrupted data."
 

Cons

"The technical support is good but they are not available all the time."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"While I utilize it for data migration, I would love to do that data migration in a GUI from an ease of use perspective."
"If there is an operating system that is discontinued, PowerPath will now also stop the support for that operating system; for example, in the case of Solaris."
"Customers do not choose PowerPath unless they have Unix or Linux."
"The product must adapt to other storage technologies like HPE 3PAR."
"Although PowerPath is very mature and has been on the market for more than 15 years there are still a lot of bugs that have been profiled with PowerPath, specifically, during any OS upgrade."
"The solution should provide extensive reports on backups and backup failures."
"Technical support is hit or miss sometimes. Level 1 support is not very good."
"I would like to see FlexGroup volumes come to parity in terms of software features with Flex volumes. It seems like FlexGroup volumes have massive scalability, but their features set is not the same as Flex volumes, so we are currently unable to use it."
"In the future, we are going to migrate to Windows-based platforms. I want to see if we can achieve similar control and implementation with Windows, basically installing NetApp ONTAP onto a Windows machine and not just onto the Linux machine."
"They could expand what is possible to do with automation as there are gaps in the Ansible module coverage they have."
"I need to be able to validate how the host is performing from the storage, as I am concerned about the host performance and storage connectivity to the host."
"We would expect that a MetroCluster would be able to provide huge performance and we had so far three outages during this year."
"We are always looking for more security enhancements and ways to continue to provide security encryption, whether it's data in rest or security in transit. We would also like to have more enhanced encryption beyond the regular TLS and 256-bit."
"We had a few small issues with setup, but once everything was done it just worked."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is good. I don't have any issues with the pricing of this solution."
"The price of the solution is fair."
"The product is a little bit expensive."
"I rate the product's price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is affordable, and ten is really expensive. Dell PowerPath is an expensive tool."
"There are no additional costs associated with the product."
"The solution is expensive."
"The licensing prices are really high."
"It helps us save money using compression and deduplication."
"ONTAP has helped us reduce the cost of storage by a lot. We were using IBM XIVs and were paying high costs, except for the maintenance. Now, we are on all-flash and we pay less than what we used to pay."
"NetApp ONTAP is moderately priced."
"We have been able to save about 3TB to 5TB of storage. We still need to do more on the compression bit, then provisioning, to save more going forward."
"There are two consumption methods: pay as you go and subscription. Pay as you go... is a little expensive but worth it."
"Our pricing with discounts is reasonable, but it may vary for others."
"It's very expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Transportation Company
15%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise69
 

Questions from the Community

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How does Azure NetApp Files compare to NetApp ONTAP?
Azure NetApp Files is a Microsoft Azure file storage service built on NetApp technology. The platform combines the file capabilities of Azure and NetApp to move critical file-based applications to ...
What needs improvement with NetApp ONTAP?
I have encountered a couple of issues with data deduplication and compression. If there were an option to set up those items separately, it would make it easier to configure and monitor those aspects.
 

Also Known As

PowerPath
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Healthcare Residential Service Company
1&1 IONOS, Acıbadem Healthcare Group, Adder Technologies, Aero Vodochody Aerospace
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerPath vs. NetApp ONTAP and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.