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NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays vs SolidFire 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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
3rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
NetApp EF-Series All Flash ...
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
29th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolidFire
Ranking in All-Flash Storage
32nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
33
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Everpure FlashArray is 6.7%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is 1.4%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolidFire is 1.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
All-Flash Storage Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Everpure FlashArray6.7%
NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays1.4%
SolidFire1.4%
Other90.5%
All-Flash Storage
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Tayo Olubanke - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director at GCET
Offers flexibility and top-notch technology
You can go to bed peacefully if you have a NetApp. If you have NetApp within your data center, you get to know about power failure if you are using it. Your NetApp will still come alive. Even if it does not come alive, I can say that it is not like other tools when it comes to dealing with power failure. The tool is affordable, and the technology is top-notch. It is the only technology that has software for what we call inline compression and deduplication. All the products under NetApp are aiming to use AI. I know that you can achieve whatever you want to do with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.
Ramil Cerrada - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution lead at Globe Mobile
A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance
The most significant benefit lies in its exceptional performance, driven by its Flash-based architecture. This enhances routing speed and, consequently, database performance. The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support is good."
"They can provide a lot of performance, so there is not a lot of difference, but efficiency is something customers value because the compression can be up to twice of the second competitor."
"I find Pure Storage FlashArray to be much better than traditional storage because it has a GUI interface. It makes the process of allocating the storage much easier, and most activities are automated. It is like clicking a button for every task."
"It's a great return on investment, based on the mission."
"The best features Everpure FlashArray offers are the speed and dependability, which are the main features that we get from Pure; it is faster than its competition, and we do not have any documented downtime from it ever."
"The most valuable feature is it never goes down. We can expand and create volumes."
"Overall, Pure Storage FlashArray has never let us down in front of customers so far."
"It saved a lot of space, as far as physical space in our data center."
"Being able to partition different virtual volumes of storage is really valuable for us."
"Compared to Dell Unity XT, what I see as an advantage in NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is the fact that it is more scalable...The performance of the product is good."
"Our batch processing time went down from 14 hours to seven hours with this solution."
"The replication and mirroring features are very good."
"Our use case is both corporate storage and for all of our datacenter and back-end enterprise applications."
"Rapid deployment, easy integration management and cloning of areas."
"We use it for our VDI environment, and have not had any complaints with it."
"I would recommend it. It is very stable, fast, and offers good support."
"Templates are already predefined for it. If you're coding it up, it will take two days. You can pick up a template right there from the API, and it just works for you. Implementation done in 10 minutes."
"If you buy the solution for its specific purpose it will work well."
"It's absolutely a consistently stable solution, with 100% up-time and no data loss at all, not even the slightest, delivering not only stability but also a lot of efficiency with the data storage."
"If you're looking for an easy-to-implement solution from an all-flash perspective, really take a look at SolidFire."
"Given the ease, for the value of the product, it's a great thing to bring in and start going to the cloud with."
"It is very easy to scale up SolidFire."
"The system efficiency is excellent overall."
"We can just buy them, scale them as we need on demand, and we don't have to spend so many front end cycles on designing the architecture."
 

Cons

"They are doing some stuff with containers and an object search. These could be improved, because containers is one of the main topics that we are talking with our customers about."
"I would like to see additional features like performance monitoring, configuring alerts, and the customization of alert thresholds."
"We did have one hiccup with the integration of vCenter. When we were installing Pure Storage, we were using vCenter 6.7, which defaults to the HTML5 Web Client. The current plugin for Pure Storage doesn't show up in that client at all. You have to go and use the legacy FlexFlash client to see the Pure Storage plugin in vCenter."
"The primary drawback is the cost, which can be prohibitive for small configurations."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database. The whole array went down so our customers were down for around eight hours. This was a very big outage which could have been our fault because we didn't do the upgrade in time."
"We would always like to see higher performance, and lower pricing is always better."
"In the next release, I would like to see file-level encryption."
"One thing I'd like to see in a future release is integration between their main storage array and what they call their FlashBlade product; to be able to snapshot directly from the primary array into multiple different backup copies on FlashBlade."
"The solution's technical support is not as good as it is supposed to be since you have to push them to get support."
"Monitoring and management handling in enterprise environments could be improved."
"It's very difficult to manage the CLI."
"I would like to have the ability to replicate data between All Flash and other NetApp storage systems."
"When it's a software-related issue, it is difficult to find an engineer that can help you."
"I've observed an issue when creating a new storage solution with NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays."
"From a manageability perspective, I like the look and the feel of the FAS series better than the EF. I think it's more straightforward and simplistic."
"This solution does not have any compression or deduplication."
"Lately, we've had lots of hardware having general issues with lots of failures. It seems like every month at least we're replacing an entire node, as opposed to just drive failures which you would normally expect, or small components."
"We had some false positives, power supplies failing, and that's really been about it. We had a couple of glitches during some upgrade processes but nothing that was really concerning to us."
"It would be good to provide administrative access at the root level to be able to do things with the system, if need be."
"The inclusion of more protocols and interfaces would make it easier to integrate with other products."
"You don't have business continuity with SolidFire. I think it could be a nice feature to have in the future."
"When you set up the nodes, we have to serial into each one of these nodes to configure the IP ranges. It's still very easy, but it's time consuming."
"I think there is room for improvement needed with its storage capability. A bigger node is needed."
"We have had to stop using this solution because the price was too high for global implementation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The Evergreen Storage subscription is a really cool concept. As long as we maintain our subscription, we will get new controllers every three years and really never have a forklift upgrade like we currently are doing. Just that future-proofing is an ease off of my mind to know that I won't have to do what I'm dong right now again."
"The pricing is an issue. However, being all-flash, it will always be sort of expensive."
"Dell and Pure Storage offer competitive pricing, but Pure Storage might have a slight advantage."
"We lost a lot of customers because we couldn't compete on price with other vendors."
"The price, in general, is around $100,000, however, I know it costs more."
"Cost-wise, it's been very effective."
"Pure has been flexible with us on the pricing models."
"You can pay extra for Evergreen support, which gives you free upgrades when new features are introduced."
"One has to opt for a perpetual-based licensing model for one year or three years. After three years, you need to renew the license."
"Adding more capacity will increase the cost."
"he price point that we're getting is very competitive in the market. Since we are buying in such a large quantity, they gave us a huge discount."
"They provide licenses upon purchase, so there's no need for additional licenses. Regarding additional expenses apart from the standard licensing fees, such as for support or maintenance, there aren't any. Updates take around twenty to thirty minutes, including rebooting the systems, and we haven't faced any problems with the NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays. We utilize various other storages like Fujitsu, IBM, and Dalian SIP, but the NetApp EF-Series stands out as we've had no issues throughout the entire year of usage."
"The price point for EF is considerably lower than the alternatives."
"It's a way to get relatively low-cost, very high-performance, low-latency block storage as a point solution."
"They need to improve its pricing. The storage market is dying. So, they need to improve the price because it should reach all people. NetApp is one of the top ones, and they are charging a little bit of royalty as compared to other storage solutions."
"This solution is not available to many users because the cost is very expensive."
"We would probably use SolidFire more, except we're getting more bang for our buck with our purchases of ONTAP right now, and the deal we made with NetApp, so it's more of just a cost decision"
"It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for what you get."
"On a scale where one is a high price and ten is a low price, I rate the solution between three and four. It is an expensive solution."
"Based on what I heard from other people, its price was on the higher side."
"The price of this solution is more expensive than others."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Construction Company
24%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business71
Midsize Enterprise38
Large Enterprise159
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise18
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I find the pricing of Everpure FlashArray to be quite high compared to other storage solutions; however, the reliabil...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
I believe we have covered the most important features; the architecture of Pure Storage is essential, and features su...
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Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
NetApp EF540, NetApp EF-Series
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
RP Data, Western Oregon University, Toei Animation
California Public Utilities Commission, RFA, 1&1, Ultimate Software , Endicia, ezVerify, MercadoLibre, Sungard Availability Services, ServInt, Elastx, Hosted Network, Colt, Crucial, iWeb, Datapipe, Databarracks
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays vs. SolidFire and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,076 professionals have used our research since 2012.