VAST Data vs Zadara comparison

VAST Data and Zadara are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. VAST Data is ranked #32, while Zadara is ranked #33 with an average rating of 7.5. VAST Data holds a 2.2% mindshare in AFS, compared to Zadara’s 0.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of VAST Data users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Zadara users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Zadara and VAST Data are competing products in the storage solutions market. Users are happier with the pricing and support of Zadara, but VAST Data is favored for its advanced features, making it worth the price for many users.

Features: Zadara is highly appreciated for its scalability, intuitive management, and seamless integration with cloud services. VAST Data impresses users with its high-performance storage, low latency, and innovative use of NVMe over Fabrics technology. While both have strong features, users looking for cutting-edge performance might lean towards VAST Data.

Room for Improvement:Zadara could enhance its backup solutions and provide more frequent updates. VAST Data needs a more user-friendly setup process and better documentation. While Zadara's updates and backup could improve, VAST Data's onboarding experience requires refinement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zadara is praised for its straightforward deployment model and responsive customer support. VAST Data, while featuring a robust deployment model, is critiqued for occasional complexities. VAST Data's customer service, though generally effective, occasionally falls short of expectations. The ease of deployment favors Zadara, while customer service quality sees both products with room for improvement.

Pricing and ROI: Users find Zadara's setup costs to be more affordable and note a satisfactory ROI. VAST Data, although having higher setup costs, delivers substantial ROI due to its advanced technology. Zadara appeals to cost-conscious users, while VAST Data attracts those prioritizing high performance even at a premium price.

To learn more, read our detailed VAST Data vs. Zadara Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

VAST Data vs. Zadara

September 2025

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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

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the All-Flash Storage category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 2.0%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VAST Data is 2.2%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zadara is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

All-Flash Storage Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Pure Storage FlashBlade	2.0%
VAST Data	2.2%
Zadara	0.3%
Other	95.5%

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

Parul-Patel

Senior Network Engineer at Holy Redeemer Health System, Inc.

High performance and throughput enhance IT backup management

The multi-dimensional scale-out design feature of Pure Storage FlashBlade is not in use in our environment. Regarding data reduction technologies, we don't get much deduplication because the data is already deduplicated from our FlashArray before we get to backup, so there is no benefit of deduplication. Regarding the integration with cloud-native ecosystem tools, we are not on cloud; we are strictly an on-premises solution. Pure Storage FlashBlade is not used by any end-user; it's used only for IT backup, with only about four people in our group managing it. I cannot recommend Pure Storage FlashBlade to other users depending upon their financial situation because it's an expensive solution, and the cost is very high, including licensing and renewal every year. I rate Pure Storage FlashBlade an eight out of ten.

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Alan Powers

HPC CTO at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Stability-wise, a device that has been up and running for years

The failover capability and resiliency are some of the solution's valuable features. The big thing is resilience because it has richer coding in it, so multiple devices can't fail. Also, one can still access a number of CBoxes that can allow one to access their file system. Once a device fails, it fails the transparency of the end-user, and it just starts using another resource. The encryption capability, the snapshots, along with a whole bunch of features make the tool valuable. VAST Data keeps adding more and more features all the time.

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Kirubel Behailu

Cloud System Engineer at cloud251

Enhancing storage management efficiency with user-friendly experience

Our customers are using Zadara for their research and development environments. We provide infrastructure for government projects, but we are often not fully aware of their specific usage. I typically use it for our infrastructure and offer both Zadara and Microsoft Azure to our customers Zadara…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The performance of FlashBlade is excellent. It does not necessarily leverage the SOS API that some of the newer products leverage, but I found its speed pretty much on par and comparable. It is fast, and it does what it is supposed to do."

"I like its size. It is smaller than the other competitors. We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte."

"Approximately 40% to 50% of my time is saved using Pure Storage FlashBlade compared to different products."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

"It's very easy-to-use."

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

"The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great."

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The solution is useful for machine learning and scientific applications, including computer simulations."

"This has been one of the most reliable storage systems that I have ever used."

"Being able to scale on demand, and being able to get out of our security operation center, and not having to purchase hardware upfront, has drastically reduced the overhead that was required to maintain our information. We have also gained additional capabilities in terms of speed of replicating that information."

"The most valuable feature of Zadara is its ease of use and safety. Overall the solution is a complete package, it has all the features needed."

"One of the most useful features is that they provide iSCSI as a service."

"The processing is much faster with this product."

"A nice feature is the immutable object storage, which can be used in conjunction with Veeam."

"The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of deployment options."

"It provides very satisfactory storage performance."

"Zadara is a fully-fledged platform, and our customers are happy with its use."

More Zadara pros

Cons

"I would also like to see better support for CIFS workloads."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade should improve on more cloud integration."

"I would like to see more deduplication."

"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."

"The technical support needs to improve. When we open a case, it is auto assigned to a support tech person. Nine out of ten times, we get an email right back saying that person is off until tomorrow. I cannot handle that. They just did this over the weekend to us, too. I had to call our rep and have them do something about it."

"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

"Compared to, for example, Hitachi NAS, the solution is not mature at all. It's just in its infancy as far as technology goes."

"I have not seen ROI."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"The read/write ratio is an area in the solution with some flaws and needs improvement."

"The write performance could be improved because it is less than half of the read performance."

"In the next release, there can be some improvements to the web console by adding more features because the console is simple. Additionally, the calculator could improve."

"Having iSCSI over the internet using a VPN, the IPSec tunnel is really the only thing that I find missing from this product."

"There are still some storage features that they lack. For example, other vendors implemented the auto-tiering feature a long time ago, while Zadara Storage Cloud is just coming out with this feature today. So, they are a little bit late compared to the market."

"Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market."

"There is room for improvement in pricing as it is currently quite expensive."

"Currently, when we do firmware upgrades, it sometimes causes issues and is not as nondisruptive as desired."

"The management interface is more geared towards end-users rather than a service partner like ourselves, and there are improvements that can be made around that."

"Cost-wise, because it's a pay-per-use model, it may ultimately end up costing us more in the long run than something we developed ourselves."

More Zadara cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our licensing is renewed annually."

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"We used a reseller for the purchase."

"The price is a little high."

"The product is very expensive."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"Price-wise, VAST Data is not the cheapest, not the most expensive one."

"We acquired VAST Data as a one-time, capital purchase."

"One of the factors that ruled out several providers was cost. They were way too expensive for the volume of data that we needed and the speed at which we needed to be able to manage it. There aren't a lot of providers that can do that."

"For our use, it's appropriately priced and overall, it's proved to be very cost-effective against other tier-one vendors."

"The pricing is very competitive and the fact that they have very compelling discounts for multi-year commitments is great."

"If you just take the street price of Zadara Storage Cloud and look up the price or cost per hour, then you could think that Zadara Storage Cloud is extremely expensive or a solution only for enterprise use. That is not true. You need to compare the entire system. This means that you don't stop looking at just the street price, but you need to consider all the features, requirements, and costs of support as well as the extra cost that other vendors have. Other players just play with hidden, additional costs. Everything is included in Zadara Storage Cloud's licensing cost; what you get is what you pay for."

"The pricing and licensing are very simple and the cost is predictable, although, like everything that you pay for as you use, you have to be mindful of what you're using."

"It is a nice licensing model and it makes it quite simple because we just pay for what we use, and the bill that comes shows us exactly what customers are using what resources."

"The price of Zadara is very good and it covers everything. There is no subscription needed."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

University

Computer Software Company

21%

Manufacturing Company

17%

Government

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	11
Midsize Enterprise	11
Large Enterprise	20

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Large Enterprise	3

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

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What needs improvement with Zadara?

The initial installation was difficult because many steps required the command line interface (CLI). Maintenance can ...

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What is your primary use case for Zadara?

I use this product as storage. Specifically, I use it as big storage. That's the main use case for Zadara ( /products...

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What advice do you have for others considering Zadara?

As for the pros and cons, the main concerns are the complexity of the initial installation and the complicated mainte...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 20% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

Dell ObjectScale vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 5% of the time

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NetApp AFF vs VAST Data

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs VAST Data

Compared 9% of the time

Databricks vs VAST Data

Compared 8% of the time

MinIO vs VAST Data

Compared 8% of the time

Qumulo vs VAST Data

Compared 7% of the time

More VAST Data Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Zadara

Compared 20% of the time

Amazon S3 vs Zadara

Compared 20% of the time

MinIO vs Zadara

Compared 17% of the time

Amazon EC2 vs Zadara

Compared 13% of the time

Google Cloud Storage vs Zadara

Compared 12% of the time

More Zadara Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

September 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

August 2025

Download VAST Data product report

Buyer's Guide

Zadara

September 2025

Download Zadara product report

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

Innovation to break decades of data storage trade-offs.

VAST Data

Zadara is a powerful enterprise-level storage solution whose design enables it to handle every aspect of a user’s data storage needs. It can be deployed in any location, using any protocol, and storing any data type that an organization requires. With Zadara, organizations can do everything that they were able to do with more traditional systems in a cheaper and more efficient way.

Zadara Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Zadara include:

Security. Zadara is built with data security in mind. All of a user’s data is heavily encrypted by Zadara’s software so that it is safe both while it is in storage and while it is being transferred somewhere else. It comes with role-based access controls that prevent a user’s data from being seen by those who lack the proper level of authorization. It also comes with dual-factor authentication and other similar methods of identity management.

Reduced costs. While Zadara offers enterprise-level storage capabilities, the costs associated with utilizing it are far less than those of similar solutions. Some of the resources that it offers are totally free of cost. The model that it utilizes is a pay-as-you-go model. Organizations only pay for the resources that they use and nothing more. Users are not required to sign up for any particular period of time. They are in complete and total control of what they spend on the solution.

Storage efficiency. Zadara ensures that users are able to store their data in the most efficient way possible. It takes a number of approaches that prevent insufficient data storage. These approaches are:

1. Thin-provision volumes. This method only allows actually written data to be counted toward the storage capacity that is consumed.

2. Pattern removal. Zadara searches a user’s stored data for repetitive binary sequences. Once it identifies the repetitive binary sequences, it deletes them.

3. Inline deduplication (all-flash only). This method ensures that Zadara only stores unique data blocks in its system.

4. Inline compression. Zadara takes data that is stored in its system and compresses it. This keeps larger blocks of data from taking up too much room.

Zadara Features

Centralized management. Zadara comes with a centralized dashboard that enables organizations to monitor and control their storage operations from a single location.

File analytics. Organizations can leverage a powerful analytics package that can provide them with critical insights. These tools can help users sort through their data and make more informed data management decisions.

Remote mirroring. This feature enables users to replicate data in two remote locations at the same time. This makes it easy for data to be recovered in the event of an unexpected loss. It also aids remote teams in their collaboration efforts by giving them access to the same data at the same time.

Reviews from Real Users

Zadara is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its extensive suite of cloud solution integrations and its object storage capability.

Steve H., the chief technology officer at Pratum, writes, “One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage computer instances there. Being able to integrate with computing, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections.”

Mauro R., the CEO of Momit SRL, says, “The object storage feature is wonderful. With traditional storage, you have a cost per gigabyte that is extremely high or related to the number of disks. With Zadara Storage Cloud, you have a cost per gigabyte that you can cut and tailor to your needs independent of the number or size of the disks.”

Zadara

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

Norwest Venture Partners, General Dynamics Information Technology, Ginkgo Bioworks

Time, Inc. A&E Network, The Washington Post, News UK, McGraw Hill, Gilt, Toshiba, Deloitte, VMware

Buyer's Guide

VAST Data vs. Zadara

September 2025

Free Report: VAST Data vs. Zadara

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