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NovaStor NovaBACKUP vs Zerto 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

NovaStor NovaBACKUP
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
33rd
Ranking in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
17th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Zerto
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
2nd
Ranking in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
309
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Backup (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Disaster Recovery (DR) Software category, the mindshare of NovaStor NovaBACKUP is 0.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 10.3%, down from 12.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
 

Featured Reviews

Rainer Kummerfeldt - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to work and offers features for tape backups, disk backups, and whatever you want
NovaStor NovaBACKUP is still working on new features because they listen to the customers and integrate their needs into new versions. You can see they make progress with each new version. They are much faster than IBM, where you sometimes have to wait years for new features. It is very quick and fast. NovaStor have big competitors like Veeam, which is very fast and aggressive. It's good, but it depends on the price. I think NovaStor might be cheaper. They have a direct connection to their developers and sales teams, which makes getting answers very fast. Veeam has a lot of features, like a special reporting tool. However, I've heard from some customers that Veeam wasn't always the right decision because it couldn't work with their environment. But Veeam has aggressive marketing, which is why they are probably in first place at the moment, besides Commvault. IBM has lost its competitive edge and is trying to catch up, but it might be too late.
Sachin Vinay - PeerSpot reviewer
Leverage disaster recovery with reliable support and cost-effective future-proof features
Zerto is straightforward to implement because it only requires the installation of an agent on the VMs designated for migration. A service, typically a VM, must also be deployed at the disaster recovery location. This entire process is simple and can be completed within three days. Zerto's near-synchronous replication occurs every minute, allowing for highly granular recovery points. This means that even if interruptions or malware disruptions occur within that minute, Zerto can restore to the last known good state, effectively recovering the entire setup to the latest backup. This capability ensures high data security and minimizes potential data loss. One of the main benefits of implementing Zerto is its data compression, which significantly reduces the load on our IPsec VPN. Zerto compresses data by 80 percent before transmitting it across the VPN, minimizing the data transferred between geographically dispersed locations. This compression and subsequent decompression at the destination alleviate the strain on the VPN, preventing overload and ensuring efficient data synchronization. Zerto simplifies malware protection by integrating it into its disaster recovery and synchronization features. This comprehensive approach eliminates the need for separate antivirus setups in virtual machines and applications. It streamlines our security measures and removes the need for additional software or solutions, resulting in an excellent return on investment. Zerto's single-click recovery solution offers exceptional recovery speed. Through the user interface, a single click allows for a complete restoration from the most recent backup within two to three minutes, enabling rapid recovery and minimal downtime. Zerto's Recovery Time Objective is excellent. In the past, if a virtual machine crashed, we would recover it from a snapshot, which could take one to two hours. With Zerto, the recovery process takes only five minutes, and users are typically unaware of any disruption. This allows us to restore everything quickly and efficiently. Zerto has significantly reduced our downtime. When malware affects our data, Zerto immediately notifies us and helps us protect other applications, even those not yet implemented with Zerto. By monitoring these applications, we can quickly identify and address any potential malware spread, minimizing downtime across our systems. Zerto significantly reduces downtime and associated costs during disruptions. Our services are unified, so in the event of a disruption without Zerto, even a half-day disruption would necessitate offline procedures. This would lead to increased manpower, service delays, and substantial financial losses due to interrupted admissions and other critical processes. By unifying service processes, Zerto minimizes the impact of outages. Zerto streamlines our disaster recovery testing across multiple locations by enabling efficient failover testing without disrupting live services. Traditionally, DR testing required downtime of critical systems, but Zerto's replication and failover capabilities allow us to test in parallel with live operations. This non-disruptive approach ensures continuous service availability while validating our DR plan, even in scenarios like malware attacks, by creating a separate testing environment that mirrors the live setup. This comprehensive testing provides confidence in our ability to handle real-world incidents effectively. This saves us over 60 percent of the time. Zerto streamlines system administration tasks by automating many processes, thereby reducing the workload for multiple administrators. This allows them to focus on other university services that require attention and effectively reallocate support resources from automated tasks to those requiring more dedicated management. Zerto is used exclusively for our critical services, providing up to a 70 percent improvement in our IT resilience.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's the easiest way to configure it."
"It is a very good and easy-to-use tool for non-technical people."
"Zerto's continuous data protection is unmatched. It's phenomenal. It's also very easy to use. The menus are self-explanatory. Once you understand the terminology of the product, what the VPGs (Virtual Protected Groups) are, you're able to pretty much do what you want in the product. It's very easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is how simple it is to implement and how quickly you can get up and running at the second site. The solution is also extremely easy to use, for example, You just log onto the console and you can do a test failover with a few clicks."
"Stable disaster recovery solution with a very simple setup and fast failover."
"Our RTO is quick, and we can recover five to ten terabytes of data within minutes of a failover."
"We are in the process of switching over our production data center and Zerto has been a true time-saver that has cost us zero downtime."
"There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better."
"It helps us keep our required retention period for specific documents and allows us to recover older documents if we have to compare and recreate those."
"RPO time for the copied-off VMs appears to be quite short."
 

Cons

"The room for improvement lies in the compatibility of NovaBACKUP with older operating systems."
"The price of NovaStor NovaBACKUP is an area that can be considered as a weakness or drawback, where improvements are required."
"We have had some issues running Linux virtual machines on the new version. There were some issues with virtual replication adapters on Cisco UCS hosts running VMware vCenter 8."
"I always get some blowback about the cost."
"One thing I would like to see in their roadmap is introducing long-term storage in the cloud such as Azure or AWS. They can make it more seamless."
"The challenge we faced occurred during a DR for a database server running on SQL Always On. We experienced a database crash and logged a case with Zerto about a year ago. They said that they do not support Always On."
"Their offsite backup is a bit clunky, but it will probably improve."
"Right now, our production environment runs on-premises, and we have a DR copy of everything that we run in production. However, our development runs on that hardware. In the case of a DR event, we would need to shut down development and bring up our secondary copy of production. We're hoping that Zerto is going to be the tool to help us do that."
"I haven't been a super big fan of the support area. The support could really be better in terms of responsiveness. I've had some issues that took two or three days to get resolved. Once I got to the right person, they were resolved quickly, but it took a while to get to that person."
"It is expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company has to make yearly payments towards the solution's maintenance and support."
"We find the Zerto pricing fits our budget."
"Having backup and DR is somewhat moderately important to us. The problem with us, and a lot of companies, is the issue with on-prem Zerto. It utilizes whatever you have for a SAN. Or, if you are like us, we have a vSAN and that storage is not cheap. So, it is cheaper to have a self-contained backup system that is on its own storage rather than utilizing your data center storage, like your vSAN. While it is somewhat important to have both backup and DR, it is not incredibly important to have both. I know Zero is trying to heavily dip their toes in the water of backup and recovery. Once you see what Zerto can do, I don't think anyone will not take Zerto because they don't necessarily specialize in backup and recovery 100 percent. They do replication so well."
"The licensing is a little bit steep, but there is some value that you do get for it as well."
"Staffing may be a little thin at times, but as far as budgeting what we buy, the price for this solution has not been so outrageous that we don't buy it."
"Zerto does a per-workload licensing model, per-server. It is simple and straightforward, but it is not super flexible. It is kind of a one size fits all. They charge the same price for those workloads. I feel like they could have some flexible licensing option possibly based on criticality, just so we could protect less important work. I would love to protect every workload in my environment with Zerto, whether I really need it or not, but the cost is such that I really have to justify that protection. So, if we had some more flexibility, e.g., you could protect servers with a two-, three-, or four-hour RPO at a certain price point versus mission-critical every five minutes, then I would be interested in that."
"We found that in an event that was massive enough to cause an entire cluster to go offline we would be happy with our core services up and running."
"In general, it's pretty fair because it is software. In our case, we built our own colo. So, the cost of the colo was very expensive, and that's where a lot of the equipment is. The same thing is there if we were going to spin up in the cloud, but as a solution, in general, it's pretty fair for what you get out of it and how it works. It's not cheap, but at the same time, you get what you pay for, and it's definitely worth the cost. You just have to understand that the cost of the software alone is not the total cost of the project of doing ransomware protection or disaster recovery. It's a piece of the pie, not the entire pie."
"Zerto is a little expensive."
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Comparison Review

it_user159711 - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 9, 2014
VMware SRM vs. Veeam vs. Zerto
Disaster recovery planning is something that seems challenging for all businesses. Virtualization in addition to its operational flexibility, and cost reduction benefits, has helped companies improve their DR posture. Virtualization has made it easier to move machines from production to…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about NovaStor NovaBACKUP?
It is a very good and easy-to-use tool for non-technical people.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for NovaStor NovaBACKUP?
My company has to make yearly payments towards the solution's maintenance and support.
What needs improvement with NovaStor NovaBACKUP?
The room for improvement lies in the compatibility of NovaBACKUP with older operating systems like Windows XP. Some customers still rely on outdated systems due to specific production requirements....
What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?
Ik fluister:VM Host Oracle en DataGuard hebben we per toeval vervangen door Zerto :-) tijdens de Zerto implementatie en VPG werden de Host Data in write-ack Block-Level gerepliceerd. Qua licentie 1...
What do you like most about Zerto?
Its ability to roll back if the VM or the server that you are recovering does not come up right is also valuable. You have the ability to roll back a few seconds or a few minutes. The rollback feat...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zerto?
I ballpark Zerto's pricing at about $1,000 per VM, which I find fair for what it does, but the cost of entry was tough initially due to the minimum number needed to start. I really needed to prove ...
 

Also Known As

NovaBACKUP
Zerto Virtual Replication
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ex'pression College, Osborne Wood Products Inc., REIT Technologies
United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
Find out what your peers are saying about NovaStor NovaBACKUP vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.