No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Pivot3 vs VMware vSAN 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
VMware vSAN
Ranking in HCI
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
234
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 VMware vSAN is 7.9%, down from 14.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware vSAN7.9%
Pivot31.6%
Other90.5%
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…
ShyamikaThamel - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium
Managing mixed RAID workloads has improved data protection and delivers strong performance
VMware vSAN can be improved in certain areas. In cases involving our large data stores with large VMs, we experience some latency, not during normal operation, but during database backup operations. We observed latency due to buffer issues from the top-of-the-rack switches. These issues are mostly network-related because all storage data traffic travels through the network. I have recently used Nutanix, and I observed that Nutanix provides better performance than VMware vSAN due to its data locality features. VMware vSAN is now providing data locality, but we did not use that option. If VMware vSAN provides additional features in the next release, such as the VM balancing feature called DRS on the cluster that VMware previously had, it would be beneficial. With DRS, VMs can move easily from one node to another within the same cluster. Nutanix does not provide that flexibility. When placing a VM on a cluster in Nutanix, the placement uses a balancing component. After that, the VM remains on the same host. If any contention occurs on the CPU or memory side, the VM stays in place until contention happens. If issues occur, the VM migrates to another host while transferring all objects to the same host. This is how their data locality is maintained. When a VM moves to any host, it moves with all VM objects. VMware vSAN does not currently offer this option. If a VM moves to another host, it accesses the disk object through the network, which increases latency. VMware vSAN now offers an option to select data locality, but it does not function like Nutanix. This is why some latency remains. If VMware vSAN can improve this feature, it would be very helpful and VMware would regain its top position.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"The technical support is very good."
"The most valuable feature is the visual encoding."
"One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter."
"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."
"It is one of the best hyperconverged solutions I've been able to get my hands on."
"I like this solution because policies (such as resiliency) are applied per virtual disk instead of applied on an entire volume."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics."
"It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system."
"vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves."
"The scalability has been quite good."
 

Cons

"Snapshot notification would be a good addition."
"Marketing needs improvement."
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources."
"The price of this solution is high compared to the competitors, so it should be lowered."
"In the next release, I would like to see compatibility and support for critical applications, like SAP."
"The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute."
"It is an expensive solution."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"Room for improvement could be in the planning stage of going to hyperconverged."
"The quality of the customer service and support depends on the vSAN case. For example, if I open ten cases, maybe two or three get resolved quickly. But the other cases have a slow response."
"There are bugs in the SAN Health Check utility. It misreports latency issues when the hosts are actual within the correct tolerances."
"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our fees are approximately $100,000 yearly."
"Due to recent changes in VMware's licensing approach by Broadcom, the cost has increased significantly, making it less attractive from a cost perspective."
"We are using the VMware vSAN ROBO which allows us to have a maximum of 25 virtual machines. The approximate cost is €10,000 for a perpetual license."
"Cost-wise, the Nutanix licenses were cheaper, but in terms of the hardware, there was some contention around it. So, in terms of implementation, the way Nutanix was projecting the implementation on their end was that there were a lot of open-source admin platforms. vSAN is a licensed product in VMware, and Nutanix was proposing a KVM solution, which is open source. That's why their pricing was a bit cheaper, but when we were trying to compare it with an enterprise version of their management platform, it boiled down to the VMware vSAN being most effective in the long run."
"For a classical node plus storage solution, the price is higher."
"Users may also start off with the demo version of the tool. After you learn to use the solution, you can buy it if it is beneficial."
"It is cheap. It is $0.02 a gig."
"​I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee.​"
"Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which HCI solutions are best for your needs.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business101
Midsize Enterprise58
Large Enterprise135
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...
How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...
How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?
We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is best suited for small- to medium-sized organizations. It is easy to create load bal...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
vSAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SNHMC, HPD Software, The Hurlingham Club, NHS, Rochester Police Department, The Doe Run Company, 101 Casino, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport
Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
Find out what your peers are saying about Pivot3 vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.