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Arcserve UDP 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

Arcserve UDP
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
19th
Ranking in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
10th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
43
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
296
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (4th), Cloud Backup (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Disaster Recovery (DR) Software category, the mindshare of Arcserve UDP is 2.5%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 10.5%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
 

Featured Reviews

MukundKambli - PeerSpot reviewer
Global deduplication, stable, and flexible licensing options
I give the solution ten out of ten. This solution offers one dashboard to manage the BC con, disaster recovery plan, DR solution, and backup as well as different licensing options, unlike other OEM products. We are the system integrators for our clients, so we design the solution as per the customer's requirements. We provide several solutions options to our clients such as Druva inSync, Druva Phoenix, and Arcserve UDP with the specifications and the client makes a decision based on their requirements. I would advise potential users to first be clear on whether they are going to use it as a backup solution for compliance purposes, just wanting to take the backups of files and servers, or for instant recovery. The IQ and RPO discussion with our customers usually takes 30 minutes. I recommend this solution.
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 backup is the most valuable feature. It also makes storage very easy."
"This product is extremely user-friendly and it is capable of performing large-scale archive/backup (five+ years worth). It is easy to store, maintain, and check backups."
"The ROI is very good because of the speed of the backup."
"The most valuable feature of StorageCraft ShadowProtect is the speed and the compression of the backups. The compressed backed-up files do not take up as much storage. Additionally, the incremental backups can be done in one minute and be backed up on a disc very fast."
"There are many backup options available in this solution. For example, you are able to do backups of servers, email, OST files, and users. This is a complete backup solution which is very good."
"The most valuable feature of Arcserve UDP is live replication."
"The product provides instant and virtual standbys."
"Arcserve has a feature called virtual standby (VSB), which has been very helpful because I already have a hot standby copy of my critical infrastructure. If something breaks, I can spin up that virtual standby copy in less than five minutes and ensure that my data is available to everyone and that business continuity is maintained."
"There wasn't anything in place that compares to what we're getting from Zerto. Before Zerto, we didn't have a proper disaster recovery program or application in place. We had a simple backup solution where we could back up our data every 24 hours. So we went from that to being able to recover full systems within a matter of minutes. With Zerto, if we do have an event or disaster, we know that we can recover from that much quicker than we were able to before."
"The most valuable feature is how quickly it powers down the original source VMs and the speed at which it powers up the new VMs. The amount of time it takes to put up the operating system is valuable. The speed is what I like the best."
"The ease of failover and test environments has proven invaluable."
"I give Zerto's stability a nine out of ten."
"Zerto enables us to do sandboxing failovers. You can run tests on a production environment in a sandbox and spin up a copy of your actual production environment in a few hours. When you're done with it, you can click a couple of buttons, and it's all blown away. You don't need to worry about reverting changes or interfering with your on-prem production environments."
"The biggest benefit is the application-consistent disaster recovery functionality."
"The continuous data protection is great. We love it because I can see exactly how many seconds behind real-time we are, which is usually under 10 seconds. It keeps things up to date. We love the product."
"It seems to be very reliable, and it consistently keeps our data synchronized within ten seconds or so, which gives our customers confidence that the data synchronization and replication will allow for a very low recovery point objective."
 

Cons

"The product is not user-friendly."
"A lot of their new technologies are not very good."
"It takes much time to verify and consolidate images for backups."
"One of the biggest drawbacks of Arcserve UDP is that it does not have a single console, making it an area that needs to be considered for improvement."
"The solution can improve by allowing older versions to support the latest version of the OS."
"The problem is just reliability. If the promises in the marketing material were realized in real life, it would be the perfect solution, but it's just the reliability issues."
"I don't know whether the tool has VMware integrations. It would be good to cover this area if it doesn't have those."
"The technical support of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"While going in, we were looking at the backup tool so that we had a DR tool and a backup tool, but they stopped developing their backup solution built into it. That was a bummer for us, so now, we have a DR solution, and we have a backup solution."
"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."
"When I have a technical question, it sometimes takes a while for tech support to respond."
"We do have some sites that are very low-bandwidth sites. Zerto is able to set throttling in the solution, but the throttling is set at a site-wide level. In those instances that have very low bandwidth, I can't reduce the throttling on that site. It would be nice if there were a way to control the throttling by the protection group for a specific workload."
"I would like to see a couple of details regarding awareness of VM events coming outside of ZVR."
"There are quite a few elements in the long-term retention areas that I wish were better. The bio-level recovery indexing of backups is the area I struggle with the most. That's probably because I desire to do tasks that ordinary users wouldn't do with the solution. The standard medium to large customer would probably never ask for anything like I ask for, so I think it's pretty good the way it is. I'm excited to see some of the new improvements coming in the 9.5 version. Some of the streamlines and how the product presents itself for some of the recovery features could be better."
"Zerto should continue adding new features. When I used it at the other bank, it wasn't good with replicating VDIs and automation."
"Another thing that would help would be a recommender, or some type of tool that says, 'Hey, you're not conforming to best practices.' It would do a conformance or compliance check to tell you if your VPGs are set up according to best practices and whether your Zerto clusters are set up optimally. It would see if you have HA enabled and whether your alerting is turned on."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are annual subscription fees and there are licensing costs for three computers. It is an expensive solution."
"The pricing is moderate."
"The price is based on the number of sockets. We use a four-socket price that includes two servers and the cost is $4,375."
"I do not work with the pricing or licensing issues of the solution for our organization."
"Pricing is most likely comparable."
"It is approximately $400 to purchase a virtual service outright."
"It is a bit pricey, considering the reliability problems. If the tool worked flawlessly, the price would be fair, even cheap."
"As an MSP partner, I believe that the prices are fair."
"The pricing doesn't seem too bad for what it does."
"Get the Enterprise Cloud license because it's the most flexible, and the pricing should come in around $1,000 per VM."
"I have heard that it is expensive, but that is not my world."
"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."
"License-wise, we budgeted $1,000 per VM. The minimum spend on it, in the beginning, can sometimes be a little bit of a headache for people, and they might have to budget creatively to get there, but once you're there, the renewals are worth it."
"If it were easier to license, and to scale it out a little bit more economically, that'd be a godsend. At the end of the day, my druthers would be to have all 200 of our servers protected by this platform. But for a company our size, that stretches our IT budget and it just doesn't make economic sense."
"We paid a big investment upfront with renewal fees each year."
"It was a little higher. We were in a corporate agreement, and we had a software package that included RP for VM. It is easy to compare pricing when you are already in a corporate agreement. Zerto lost on the pricing scorecard."
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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
19%
Non Profit
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Major Differences Between These 4 Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions?
Comparing the features of the four is not the right approach. You need to develop a list of requirements for backup and DR that are specific to your organization and then compare each of the four ...
What do you like most about Arcserve UDP?
The most valuable feature of Arcserve UDP is the initiative UI and the logs are clear and detailed that are generated when there has been an issue or failure on the user's system. We only have to l...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Arcserve UDP?
The licensing cost is for one year. There are not any hidden costs involved in the pricing model of the solution.
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?
It is not the cheapest product; it is not the most expensive product, but it works. It is a mid-range product, and it is justified in terms of being pretty quick and easy.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

StorageCraft ShadowProtect, StorageCraft Backup Analyzer
Zerto Virtual Replication
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ITPS, North Hertfordshire Homes, SEMIKRON, Kajaani University of Applied Sciences, Test Valley Borough Council, EK Services
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 Arcserve UDP vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
839,319 professionals have used our research since 2012.