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OpenText Data Protector 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

OpenText Data Protector
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
22nd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
102
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Zerto
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
309
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of OpenText Data Protector is 0.6%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 3.0%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Jeroen Vranckaerts - PeerSpot reviewer
Though a highly stable tool, it needs to be made easier to use and configure
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a five out of ten. OpenText Data Protector is complex to configure correctly, but the areas concerning the data and compression are good. Once you get the product to work, it works, but it's much too complex to configure and troubleshoot, as it takes a lot of time and energy, making it not so efficient. Once the tool is configured in your environment, it provides good backup and compression features. In my company, we use OpenText Data Protector as a backup for our servers, and we have a team of 20 people to take care of the data backup using the tool. My company doesn't use OpenText Data Protector as a backup for our client's computers. In my company, we have scheduled the process related to backup, which makes the tool run daily around 30 to 40 times.
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

"The initial setup is straightforward if you understand Data Protector."
"The initial setup is very easy."
"What we find most valuable in Micro Focus Data Protector is that it provides Japanese data protection, for example, it protects information such as the full Japanese name, address, etc."
"I have used Micro Focus Data Protector for the file backup facilities. My primary use of the software is to backup file data."
"Data Protector's GUI is the most useful feature."
"I like that it supports HPE UNIX servers since many backup solutions do not - this is the main reason why we chose this solution."
"It's user-friendly and not overly complicated to configure."
"Data Protector's granular recovery features make it easy for us to create and restore backups in an understandable and user-friendly manner. With granular recovery, any database or even just a database table can be restored at will."
"I really like how you can test the failover as often as you need."
"The second feature that sold us was the sub-second RPO. One of the things that made Zerto's product stand out from some of the more traditional solutions four years ago was its ability to maintain sub-second RPO over a group of machines, and that group of machines could be spread over multiple storage hardware."
"With Zerto, we were able to replicate our virtual servers to a remote DR site across a WAN connection."
"We used Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. It depends on the network and environment, but the RTO takes around 7-8 seconds. When you compare Zerto to other solutions in the market, it's very powerful."
"I found VM level replication and being able to group the VM levels to be valuable. I like not having to worry about whether a particular VM is in the right storage group; some of those sorts of things would trip us up previously."
"Using Zerto, you can have your VM up and running in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is flip a switch, then you are good to go."
"The pricing and licensing are excellent. It's very straightforward."
"We work a lot with customers that need disaster recovery and the best possible migration approaches, and Zerto helps them minimize the amount of effort it takes to finish their upgrades or migrations."
 

Cons

"I do not think that this solution is relevant in the current IT market. They have not upgraded their features and functionalities which makes it difficult for them to remain competitive."
"We have a lot of requests for the Micro Focus team, particularly in terms of the Japanese data pattern, as it's not as good now. The Japanese data pattern accuracy of the Micro Focus Data Protector needs to be improved because there are a lot of false negatives and false positives. We are currently testing this and our product team has been communicating with the Micro Focus team."
"Recently, clients have raised concerns about the lack of comprehensive documentation for Data Protector."
"The technical support was very slow."
"It can occasionally be inaccurate in its backup/recovery time estimates."
"Other tools seem to be easier to use."
"The graphical interface needs to be improved."
"I'm uncertain if it supports virtual machine backup and restoration. If they could enhance this aspect, they could gain more support from end users."
"The knowledge base could be improved. Sometimes, it's finicky, especially when moving storage around. We've had to redo entire processes, which was time-consuming and resulted in data loss. This has happened multiple times, and despite following support steps and contacting support, we often had to resolve issues on our own."
"They should not make it so expensive so that I can buy more of it."
"I wish there was a mechanism or plug-in to do IP failover. That's the only manual thing that we would have to do."
"Patch management can be better. Although we are doing patch management on the Zerto platform in an automated manner, it can be improved by leveraging some AI-assisted technology. With the help of AI, things are going to be faster in terms of patching the solution."
"They have moved to appliances, and the configuration of appliances is a bit complicated."
"I have had problems with vRAs. When I am trying to restart a host, sometimes the vRAs will hang. I would like it if they wouldn't migrate off or shut themselves down, then I have to manually work with it a lot of the time."
"In the future, the tool's user interface needs to be refreshed since it seems to be becoming somewhat antiquated."
"The alerting could be fine tuned and improved. It does a lot of alerts, but it's a little bit cumbersome to modify them."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution requires paying for a license."
"They have two types of licensing, one is for storage capacity and the other is client licensing. The capacity licensing here is a bit expensive."
"In Data Protector, if you need extra features, you need to buy the agents for these features. Some of the features are Terabytes, some of them are agents. There's some complexity in the pricing and licensing."
"Pricing for Micro Focus Data Protector is reasonable."
"We have many competitors who are pricing better, and we believe that our pricing is higher."
"It is fast, reliable, and its licensing policy is great."
"The pricing is around $3,000 to $5,000. The charge additionally for support and to scale."
"Avoid using many LTO drives; when using fewer drives, the price will be extremely good."
"I would suggest getting a dedicated, well-informed rep."
"There may be less expensive solutions on the market but with Zerto, you get what you pay for."
"It's very reasonably priced. It's a little more than $3,000 annually. That works out to about $20 per server per month."
"My understanding is that it's expensive but worth the price."
"Its licensing is yearly. You can do multi-year contracts, which is what we did. You pay per VM, and you replicate a license per VM. So, we bought about 20 licenses. We paid somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000. There is an initial upfront cost. Basically, you buy the license, and then you have a maintenance cost on top of that. So, the upfront cost is somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000. The maintenance is $5,000 to $10,000 over a three-year period."
"From a pricing standpoint, there is value in it without question. However, it can become quite expensive when you start looking at the number of workloads you have in the environment and what you would like to do."
"Currently, it is good, but the license we are using is based on VM count. We are only protecting mission-critical servers, so we are using a very low number, about 300. However, we have 3,000 or more servers. If we consider using Zerto for data protection, it would cost us more than what we have for data protection now."
"Obviously, it would be nice to have it for free. Nevertheless, a lot of effort has gone into making it a top-notch product. An excellent product with expert support is never going to be cheap. I think it's fairly priced for what it does and the benefit it brings to our business."
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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
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Micro Focus Data Protector?
I haven't experienced any crashes while using the solution...Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Micro Focus Data Protector?
The solution is expensive as it requires purchasing all features without the option to negotiate based on client numbers, unlike Veeam which offers flexibility in pricing.
What needs improvement with Micro Focus Data Protector?
OpenText Data Protector is not user-friendly, especially for cloud backup. It lacks functions and facilities compared to Veeam, which offers more user-friendliness for virtual machine backups. Ther...
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

Micro Focus Data Protector, Data Protector, OmniBack, HPE Data Protector
Zerto Virtual Replication
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

GSK Vaccines, Repsol, Vodafone Group, Siemens AG, Medium Enterprise Transportation Services Company
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 OpenText Data Protector vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.