AWS Backup vs Zerto comparison

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AWS Backup

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

Zerto and AWS Backup compete in the disaster recovery and data protection market. Zerto seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced capabilities and customer support.

Features: Zerto offers real-time replication, hardware-independent disaster recovery, and supports replication across multiple hypervisors, allowing for failover testing without impacting production environments. AWS Backup automates backups for AWS services, relying on periodic snapshots and integrates seamlessly within the AWS ecosystem, supporting regular backups and data protection.

Room for Improvement: Zerto needs enhancements in documentation and reporting. There are demands for support for more hypervisors and automated load balancing. AWS Backup could improve by offering file and database-level backups, refining restore processes, and enhancing hybrid cloud capabilities, along with providing customizable backup schedules.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zerto, deployed on-premises or hybrid clouds, is praised for excellent technical support and customer service. AWS Backup, designed for cloud-based deployment, follows a pay-as-you-go model and is perceived as less customer service-focused, with room for improvement in integrating hybrid environments.

Pricing and ROI: Zerto's premium pricing, based on VM licensing, reflects its extensive disaster recovery features and justifies ROI through downtime reduction. AWS Backup, using a pay-as-you-go model without licensing costs, offers competitive pricing aligned with ease within AWS ecosystems, though potentially more expensive for broader environments.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS Backup vs. Zerto Report (Updated: March 2025).

AWS Backup vs. Zerto

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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

AWS Backup

Ranking in Cloud Backup

10th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

SaaS Backup (4th)

Zerto

Ranking in Cloud Backup

2nd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

299

Ranking in other categories

Backup and Recovery (2nd), Cloud Migration (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud Backup category, the mindshare of AWS Backup is 3.5%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 4.1%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Backup

Featured Reviews

MuhammadAzhar Khan

Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group

Simplify compliance and management of multiple backups with centralized cloud solutions

AWS Backup could benefit from including more services. Currently, it only includes around ten services, while AWS offers over three hundred plus services. Also, it would be helpful if AWS Backup could integrate logs more thoroughly. This would allow not only new users but also experienced users to more easily check logs directly from AWS Backup.

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Sachin Vinay

Assistant Manager-Networks at Amrita

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.

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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 features of AWS Backup are very service-oriented and user-friendly."

"It provides an easy data migration process from on-premise to cloud."

"The solution's most valuable features are its backup capability and tight integration with other AWS services."

"When I was using an on-premises backup, there was an external hard drive or something like that. I had a backup server, but I had a few problems related to transfer when I had to restore something that I have deleted. I had to wait for after-office hours to do something like that, but now I just have to send a mail. Within one hour, I have my restored file."

"The auto-scaling feature and the time efficiency of setting up AWS Backup are the most valuable aspects for us."

"It is an easy-to-use solution."

"It is highly scalable for both SMEs and large enterprises."

"The snapshots we take through AWS Backup are very effective."

More AWS Backup pros

"The most important feature is that the recovery point (RPO) is less than one minute. The is really good for our customers, as they can keep their data loss to a minimum."

"I like the automation of transferring data in the case of any disaster to our VMs. It is also easy to use and fast."

"The pricing and licensing are excellent. It's very straightforward."

"The ease of use and simplicity in moving things without having to do a cross-v set of V-motions has been most valuable. It saves time and effort and it eliminates mistakes."

"Its ease of use is most valuable. The online documentation is very clear and helpful. We are able to solve a lot of problems on our own without having to contact support."

"The recovery speed is much faster and less complicated."

"The granularity enables us to failover specific workloads instead of an all-or-nothing type of scenario, where you have to move your entire IP block and your data center, or you have to move large chunks of VMs. Those situations also make it prohibitive to test effectively."

"Zerto's two main features are ease of management and that the product just works. It does what they say it'll do."

More Zerto pros

Cons

"AWS Backup could benefit from including more services."

"There could be a centralized dashboard with a reporting feature notifying us of daily backup status."

"AWS Backup could improve because you cannot use Glacier or anything but EFS."

"They should work on their visual capabilities."

"The service disconnects a lot."

"The solution's reporting features and restore features can be improved."

"AWS Backup could benefit from including more services. Currently, it only includes around ten services, while AWS offers over three hundred plus services."

"For additional functionalities, it should be more intelligent, like more AI-capabilities."

More AWS Backup cons

"Better alerting is something that I feel is critical."

"Zerto generates many false positive alerts, which is annoying. I still have thousands of alerts in my inbox, and those are false alerts. When I check there's actually no problem."

"Some of the cloud instructions around VNets and peering of networks could be clearer with some best-case examples. It is more complicated once you move into the cloud than running it on-premises. Actually doing these things is quite easy in the cloud and with Azure, but understanding how it fits in my environment can be quite a head-scratcher at times."

"Zerto should add the capability to replicate the same VM to multiple sites."

"Recently, they started forcing everybody to use a Linux-based appliance for their z/VMs. That appliance has been extremely touchy and, in some cases, problematic."

"The improvement that I would like to see is a little bit easier product knowledge, things like that. It's getting a lot better than it was before because it's not as old of a product as Cisco, but if you look for something like Cisco routing and networking, you'll find millions of articles out there and it's everywhere."

"The setup of the system, although simple to get working, is a little more tricky to get right. This aspect could have benefitted from a bit more explanation."

"The reporting could be improved in terms of the reports that you can show to auditors to prove that you have done the testing. I provide the reports that it generates now but, it would be great if, at the end of a DR test, it would generate a report of everything that Zerto did."

More Zerto cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is inexpensive."

"The pricing is decent."

"AWS Backup is a very cheap solution."

"The clients pay for the whole AWS bundle. It is an affordable solution."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"The pricing is okay."

"AWS Backup is free of cost, but we need to pay for the backup storage being used."

"Its price is much cheaper than some vendors but more expensive than others."

More AWS Backup pricing and cost advice

"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."

"It's very equitable, otherwise you wouldn't do it. It's something that we utilize for the licenses per core as far as what we're backing up. Therefore, it's very cost-efficient as far as the licensing goes. For the amount of stuff that we're backing up and what we're utilizing it for, the licensing is not very expensive at all."

"Its price can be better, but it is not bad. Most small-scale organizations can afford it, but they can come up with more customer-friendly packages."

"When we purchased Zerto, we felt it was worth the cost as it would protect us from any potential problems and give us peace of mind knowing that any critical items could be recovered quickly."

"Pricing depends on your future growth. Start small and then scale up."

"The solution is very cost-effective and very easy to set-up but does not compromise on features."

"Staffing may be a little thin at times, but as far as budgeting what we buy, the price for this solution has not been so outrageous that we don't buy it."

"While conducting our proof of concept, I compared prices with just one other vendor. At the time, the price for Zerto was more favorable."

More Zerto pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user159711

Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Computer Software Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS Backup?

The solution's most valuable features are its backup capability and tight integration with other AWS services.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS Backup?

AWS Backup operates on a pay-as-you-go model without requiring a license.

What needs improvement with AWS Backup?

There are multiple enhancements needed in terms of compatibility with all database services, as AWS Backup is currently limited to specific ones.

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?

Zerto is definitely more costly compared to its competitors, such as VMware Site Recovery Manager. It may not be suitable for small and medium-sized industries.

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Comparisons

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Compared 22% of the time

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Compared 14% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud vs AWS Backup

Compared 6% of the time

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Veeam Data Platform vs Zerto

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Live Recovery vs Zerto

Compared 13% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Zerto

Compared 10% of the time

Rubrik vs Zerto

Compared 8% of the time

Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines vs Zerto

Compared 6% of the time

More Zerto Competitors

Product Reports

AWS Backup

Download AWS Backup product report

Download Zerto product report

Also Known As

No data available

Zerto Virtual Replication

Overview

AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service that makes it easy to centralize and automate the backup of data across AWS services. With AWS Backup, you can create backup policies, define backup schedules, and manage backups across multiple AWS accounts and regions from a single console. It supports a wide range of AWS services, including Amazon EBS volumes, Amazon RDS databases, Amazon DynamoDB tables, Amazon EFS file systems, and more.

AWS Backup provides a simple and cost-effective solution for protecting your data and ensuring business continuity. It offers features like cross-region replication, incremental backups, and point-in-time recovery. With AWS Backup, you can easily restore your data to any point in time and recover from accidental deletions or data corruption.

It also provides a centralized view of your backup activity, allowing you to monitor and manage backups across your entire AWS infrastructure. AWS Backup is designed to be highly durable and secure, with data encrypted at rest and in transit. It integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for fine-grained access control and supports compliance with various industry standards and regulations.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Zerto is used for disaster recovery, business continuity, data migration, and ransomware recovery, providing continuous data protection and near real-time replication. Valued for ease of use, efficient failover processes, and versatile integration, it enhances organizational efficiency, reduces errors, and boosts productivity.

Sample Customers

TransferWise

United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies

AWS Backup vs. Zerto