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Pivot3 vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 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

Pivot3
Ranking in HCI
25th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
StarWind HyperConverged App...
Ranking in HCI
14th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Pivot3 is 1.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 1.9%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance1.9%
Pivot31.6%
Other96.5%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1124199 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Manager at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Stable, good technical support, and the the visual encoding works well
The most valuable feature is the visual encoding I would like to see better video compression. Snapshot notification would be a good addition. The price of this solution is high compared to the competitors, so it should be lowered. I have been using Pivot3 for between four and five years. This…
Russ Le Puill - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at St Peter's Church of England Aided School
Proactive support with improved speed and resilience
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It greatly streamlined the time it took to scale out the enterprise and it completely eliminated the need for a SAN/Storage engineer, with the simplicity the Pivot3 Stack Manager brought with it for managing storage."
"One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter."
"The most valuable feature is the visual encoding."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"The technical support is very good."
"The most valuable aspect of StarWind is the all-in-one solution that they provide."
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"We are very happy and the number of incidents and stress has been greatly reduced."
"This has been great for our organization; we run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available and highly redundant."
"This solution improved our environment from an increased user experience and administrative experience."
"Starwind HCA allowed us to provide customers with a much higher service level and guarantee 99.999% uptime, while reducing our physical server footprint, cutting data center costs, and giving us peace of mind by consolidating onto brand new powerful hardware."
"It is extremely reliable, has very very few issues, and has next to no downtime."
"The ease of management through one console for the storage of all of our datacenters worldwide: Going from managing multiple SANs with each of their own consoles and software versions to having a single console to handle all of the company's storage simplified things a lot for us."
 

Cons

"Snapshot notification would be a good addition."
"In the next release, I would like to see compatibility and support for critical applications, like SAP."
"The price of this solution is high compared to the competitors, so it should be lowered."
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources."
"Marketing needs improvement."
"Updates need improvement."
"Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow."
"It would be nice if it were possible to do the ISCSI setup that you do on Windows directly in the management GUI of StarWind."
"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."
"The only issue we have seen is with the StarWind Server Manager. We have had to continually reboot the server in order to use it."
"The user interface needs an update for the Windows client."
"The only issue we have had was the issue of performance, however, that is only due to the fact that we purchased a mix of SSD and regular spindle drives, and restoring databases was slow as it was trying to restore the database using the spindle drives."
"The only thing that can use improvement is the StarWind Management Console and Command Center."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our fees are approximately $100,000 yearly."
"We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."
"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."
"We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."
"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."
"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."
"Its cost was reasonable."
"There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."
"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Construction Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Educational Organization
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business51
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.
What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
I think nothing needs improvement in StarWind HyperConverged Appliance.
What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
My main use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is server failover. I use StarWind HyperConverged Appliance for server failover to ensure high availability for the server.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SNHMC, HPD Software, The Hurlingham Club, NHS, Rochester Police Department, The Doe Run Company, 101 Casino, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport
Sears Home and Franchise Business
Find out what your peers are saying about Pivot3 vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.