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AvePoint Cloud Backup vs CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 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

AvePoint Cloud Backup
Ranking in Cloud Backup
11th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
SaaS Backup (3rd)
CTERA Enterprise File Servi...
Ranking in Cloud Backup
12th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (2nd), NAS (9th), Cloud Migration (7th), Cloud Storage (10th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (8th), Cloud Storage Gateways (2nd), Content Collaboration Platforms (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Backup category, the mindshare of AvePoint Cloud Backup is 3.8%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Backup
 

Featured Reviews

Robert Hedblom - PeerSpot reviewer
Focuses on not just backup but also on providing highly granular restore capabilities, ensuring that data can be restored at a very specific level rather than restoring entire environments
The fact that AvePoint focuses on restore capabilities, not just backup is valuable. The main intention of backup is to restore data, and that's the major differential with AvePoint compared to other vendors. Many claim to do backup, but that's not the same. The crucial part is the ability to perform granular restores, having restore-level objectives (RLO) instead of restoring entire SharePoint sites when you only need a single document. AvePoint excels in providing extremely granular restore capabilities with great Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). AvePoint Cloud Backup comes with Immutable Storage and our OPEX licensing model also includes Unlimited Storage.
Igal Muginstein - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers flexibility, fast performance, and ransomware protection
The platform is releasing new features at a fast pace, which sometimes leads to version updates every three to six months. Although updates are generally not complex, it is challenging to stop the production environment during these updates, even if the downtime is just a few minutes. This is a common challenge across all NAS providers. From my perspective, the most important area for improvement is developing a method to perform updates without affecting customer production environments. Additionally, there are some cache size limitations that might become problematic for future use cases, though they don’t impact current applications. Collaboration for NFS and SMB protocols could also be enhanced. Although this issue isn't specific to CTERA, it is something we are working on together to improve. The quality of the versions has improved, but occasional issues still arise. All solutions face this challenge, but we hope to see a continued reduction in the number of bugs. That said, we haven't had any major production problems in the last four years, and we appreciate how responsive CTERA is to our issues. We engage in brainstorming sessions together, and we value this relationship.

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 super easy."
"It is a very good and stable solution...With AvePoint's support, our experience has been exceptional"
"The most valuable features are the email backup and the SharePoint backup."
"The SaaS feature of AvePoint Cloud Backup is very strong."
"The recovery options in Microsoft 365 are not adequate and it does not help to recover data from the recycle bin that is older than 90 days. The solution has made us more efficient and helps to recover data that is older than 90 days."
"The most promising feature of the product is data security policies, which make it simpler to include compliance processes."
"I rate the overall solution a 9 out of 10."
"It is the best product in the market for Office 365 backup, and our customers are satisfied with it."
"The support is awesome. It is top-notch. I would rate their support a ten out of ten."
"The best feature is the migration tool within CTERA."
"I like that the glass is always half full with CTERA file services. It keeps the data hot for users on location and then tiers off older data. If you need it, the stub is still there. You can click on it, and it's back on the device."
"The solution provides substantial flexibility, allowing the separation of workloads across various hardware platforms without vendor lock-in. This flexibility makes it adaptable to future infrastructure changes."
"CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow."
"CTERA stood out due to its ease of use and superior security features."
"The solution provides data eviction, where unused data is evicted from the local file, freeing up space. It also allows data to be rehydrated from the cloud when needed."
"CTERA's instantaneous and redundant file replication, available across multiple geographical locations, ensures easy and user-friendly recovery."
 

Cons

"Some customers choose other backup solutions because AvePoint is Office 365 and CRM backup system, but they have other backup needs for Azure and so on. Such customers often choose another backup solution instead of AvePoint."
"For improvement, AvePoint can provide details on how the tool's backup scope works."
"The configuration could be made easier."
"It is challenging for small or medium-sized businesses to purchase it."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The restoration could be faster."
"The component in the product that can be improved revolves around the area where the tool should focus on providing more of a custom touch to the policies."
"I would like to see improvements in the tool's initial seed. The initial seed of around 10 TB of SharePoint data took 45 days to complete."
"Stability-wise, we just went through one issue that they addressed. We were having cloud sync issues."
"It has a learning curve."
"AI and automation features could enhance the platform, such as AI-powered search, predictive storage analytics, and intelligent alerts for proactive monitoring. Predictive storage analytics will help with better capacity planning. There can be some sort of intelligent alerts for proactive monitoring."
"One suggested improvement for the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is the ability to distribute data across multiple active backend storage nodes rather than the current limitation of a single active node."
"I am looking for a process where version upgrades do not impact the customers. There is no downtime."
"The web portal that our users access to view data and backups could be optimized. CTERA could apply some of the improvements made to their administrative interface on the user side. The administrators are a much smaller group of people than the users, so it would be helpful if they targeted user experience resources to them."
"It would help to have a global single-pane-of-glass view of all my CTERA devices. We have different regions, and we must log in to each portal to see what's happening with those. It would be nice to have a single portal to see the health of the devices, versions, and firmware upgrades. Sometimes, we want to dive into something more complex, like investigating why CTERA storage usage grew from 2 terabytes to 4 terabytes in a week. That's a little challenging. It's something we would like to see on the road map."
"One of the bigger things that I would like to see is additional logging. There are logs in there. They provide us with the initial logs on what is happening on our CTERA device. I appreciate that, but they do not give us any further information. I would like to have more information on the logs themselves."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform is more expensive than other vendors."
"I would say that the pricing policy of the product is flexible and good."
"I rate the product's price a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."
"I am not sure, but I believe that the cost is $7 USD per user."
"It is very good for many of my customers in the banking and finance segments. The price isn't a problem there, but in some other industries, people ask for a cheaper solution. When the price is an issue for the customer, we recommend Veeam, Metallic."
"It costs a little bit more than other competitors in the market."
"The pricing part of the solution is based on a subscription model, which is based on the number of users or storage capacity."
"I find the pricing reasonable. They offered us deals that helped us. Especially with the upgrade to a bigger unit last year, they were helpful with the deal."
"CTERA's pricing model is competitive compared to other companies that achieve the same thing. Their closest rival is Nasuni, and CTERA is significantly more affordable than Nasuni."
"So far, pricing seems to be fine."
"CTERA's pricing seems to be on par with some of the other players, such as Nasuni and Azure. They all have benefits, but CTERA is competitive for its features."
"It is fairly priced. I am not too involved in the pricing of what we used to pay, but it would have reduced the cost of ownership. I cannot give a figure, but the EMC solution was very expensive compared to CTERA."
"It is hard to compare the costs if we want to retain the same model of a separate high-performance storage or certain things, but it is one of the cheapest solutions available in Israel."
"I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Retailer
5%
Computer Software Company
70%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Educational Organization
4%
University
3%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does AvePoint Cloud Backup compare with Veeam Backup for Office 365?
AvePoint Cloud Backup for MS Office 365 is a SaaS backup whose features include secure storage and unlimited and automated backups. The storage is saved in AvePoint’s Azure storage or it can also b...
What do you like most about AvePoint Cloud Backup?
The product's initial setup phase was super easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
I am not directly involved in the pricing aspects, but I understand that CTERA's pricing is competitive and within industry standards.
What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
One area for improvement is the migration tool, which at times does not work as designed, necessitating the use of alternative solutions like Robocopy. AI and automation features could enhance the ...
What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
We use it as a hosted cloud solution. We had initially tried Azure File Sync, but that did not work. Due to certain security concerns, I was tasked with researching alternatives. I evaluated severa...
 

Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Swedish Match, Hydro, Mercury IT, Avepoint
McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI
Find out what your peers are saying about AvePoint Cloud Backup vs. CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.