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: April 2025).

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AWS Backup vs. Zerto

April 2025

Helped 849,190 peers since 2012

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

304

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 replication in the recovery region is the most valuable feature."

"The customer service is top-notch, rated ten out of ten."

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

"We can directly back up EC2 instances in AWS without using any third-party applications."

"The advantage that AWS Backup has over competitors is that it's very simple."

"It also saves costs and is quick."

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

"The solution has an effective overwrite feature."

More AWS Backup pros

"The most valuable features in Zerto are ease of use number one and the support that has come from the Zerto team."

"Most of the time, this is at least a two person job. We used to have three people doing it. Previously, when we had a disaster recovery drill, the way it worked was 12 of us would show up in the office on a Friday night and work overnight from 12:00 AM on Friday night to 8:00 AM in the morning on Saturday. Then, three of us would be working for four hours out of those eight or nine hours just getting applications up and running in Arizona. Now, for the disaster recovery drill, I just stay onsite to help and assist anybody else as they need during that time frame and my work is done in about a 30-minute time frame. This is compared to the four or five hours it used to take for the three of us to do it."

"Zerto provides our customers with the ability to continue work, even if something happens to their office or data center."

"Journaling allows us to leverage Zerto's journal for sub-minute recoveries, instead of having to wait for the storage array to replicate."

"I love the seamless data integration between on-premises and cloud environments. Fast disaster recovery is also valuable."

"It's one of the easiest products out there, as far as managing and using it go. The UI is pretty dead simple."

"The most valuable aspect of Zerto is synchronized replication, which is very useful."

"I like the fact that Zerto is target agnostic. It doesn't care what type of storage it writes to. The journaling is also excellent. You can easily and quickly restore to seconds before an event. The immutable data copies feature is one reason we adopted Zerto. That's one of its selling points."

More Zerto pros

Cons

"One improvement I would like to see in AWS Backup is the implementation of incremental backups."

"There are some limitations to partial backup in AWS Backup."

"Its cost could be better than a few of its competitors."

"This backup tool does the full backup of the entire snapshot server. I would like to have the option to not do the full server backup."

"They should work on their visual capabilities."

"It could be less expensive."

"When it comes to encrypting data, it is not so convenient."

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

More AWS Backup cons

"The recovery processes of large datasets in the Cloud have room for improvement."

"Some of the integrations with our internal tools, in particular, company-specific ones, do not work. In cases like this, we have to ask for additional support."

"I am very pleased with it as is, but the ease of use of the restoration utility could be challenging initially."

"We had a situation where we had to relicense VMs once they were moved over. We later found out that that feature is built-in, but it's not easy to find. The way it's done is that you have to go to the target site to turn it on. If that were explained a little bit better up front, that would be helpful."

"Now, everything is moving to the cloud and many modern app solutions are based on virtualization and cloud, however, for situations where Unix platforms are used, we'd like them to be able to support that."

"The pricing could always be lower."

"I would like to see improvement on the Zerto Virtual Replication appliances, so that they are a little bit more streamlined as opposed to now where they just span multiple ZVR appliances like there were gremlins... as this thing grows it just spawns unlimited numbers of additional ZVR appliances and you end up with a bunch so that you can't really tell which is which."

"Zerto could improve the product by lowering the cost."

More Zerto cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are no licensing costs for AWS Backup. You pay only for the amount of backup storage you use and then the data transferred between regions. Overall AWS Backup is priced reasonably."

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

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"It's a myth that Cloud is cheap. Cloud is cheap initially, but the cost over time can be equal to your own infrastructure if you consume a lot."

"Our customers pay a monthly AWS fee that includes the AWS Backup service."

"AWS is more expensive than some competitors like Azure."

"We don't use a lot of space, only approximately 900 GB, so the price is reasonable. For standing, it's okay. We normally do a payment to SSML, and they are the ones who pay over there. It is around $100 monthly."

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

More AWS Backup pricing and cost advice

"Compared to other options like SRM, Zerto is a more expensive solution, making it primarily suitable for larger organizations."

"In a world where others are catching up, e.g., VMware High Availability, there needs to be a less expensive option as well. When a customer has approximately 100 VMs, if you multiply by 40, we aren't charging a very high margin on it at all since the license is so expensive. We feel their pain. That is the most expensive part of it. The storage, CPU, and RAM are a lot less. It is the licensing that is really expensive. Whereas, with an option like VMware High Availability, it is a couple dollars per month. That is our spend that we are charged by VMware, then our margin is higher on those VMs. Giving us some ability to have higher margins, as an MSP, would be a good thing."

"The pricing is slightly above average, but the immediate and comprehensive support makes the price acceptable."

"The cost is one of the only drawbacks of Zerto because it's very high, and the overall impact of the solution on our organization is relatively low. This is why we are trying to figure out if another product could fulfill the same role for cheaper."

"The licensing cost is fair."

"Zerto is not cheap but is an invaluable asset."

"The licensing is a little bit steep, but there is some value that you do get for it as well."

"Get the Enterprise Cloud license because it's the most flexible, and the pricing should come in around $1,000 per VM."

More Zerto pricing and cost advice

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Backup solutions are best for your needs.

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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

15%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Computer Software Company

23%

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?

The setup is somewhat expensive. I'd rate the pricing seven out of ten.

Commvault Cloud vs AWS Backup

Comparisons

Compared 24% of the time

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery vs AWS Backup

Compared 22% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs AWS Backup

Compared 14% of the time

Rubrik Go vs AWS Backup

Compared 8% of the time

Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud vs AWS Backup

Compared 6% of the time

More AWS Backup Competitors

Veeam Data Platform vs Zerto

Compared 15% 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

Download AWS Backup product report

AWS Backup

April 2025

Download Zerto product report

March 2025

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