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13,197 views|10,502 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
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Read 236 Zerto reviews
10,502 views|5,618 comparisons
98% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 19, 2023

We compared Azure Backup and Zerto based on user reviews in five categories. We reviewed all of the data and you can find the conclusion below.

  • Features: Azure Backup is commended for its scalability, comprehensive security options, and non-disruptive backup process. Users also like its seamless integration with various Azure services. Users say Zerto offers excellent data protection, and it’s easy to create VMs. Zerto users also like its real-time replication features. Azure Backup needs to improve its backup and file-level restoration procedure. Zerto could improve cloud environment configuration, PowerShell scripting, and multi-site replication.

  • Service and Support: Azure's customer service is generally considered helpful and proactive, but a few users have reported longer wait times and slow issue resolution. Customers have generally had positive experiences with Zerto's customer service, noting their quick response times and ability to resolve issues. Some customers have encountered slower response times and needed to go through multiple levels of support to get their issues resolved.

  • Ease of Deployment: Azure Backup's setup is easy, quick, and can be completed with minimal user involvement. The setup process for Zerto can be either simple or complicated, depending on the individual's experience with backup solutions.

  • Pricing: Azure Backup is a cloud-based solution, so its pricing depends on factors like storage and data consumption. Azure offers competitive pricing and is considered more cost effective than many competing solutions. Zerto’s price tag is considered reasonable and in line with industry norms. Others said it was somewhat expensive but still worth the cost.

  • ROI: Azure Backup offers a solid return on investment with its affordable pricing and low initial costs, particularly when upgrading solutions. Zerto reduces risks while saving costs and time. It increases efficiency, ensures compliance, and helps businesses grow.

Comparison Results: Azure Backup is an affordable, scalable solution that features an effortless deployment and native integration with Azure services. While reviews of Azure Backup’s features were generally positive, some users reported unsatisfactory experiences with Azure support. Zerto offers top-tier data protection, excellent customer service, and real-time replication, but some users say its cloud and multi-site functionality could be better.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Backup vs. Zerto Report (Updated: May 2024).
771,157 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"With Azure Backup, you can readily make your environment if your setup somehow fails on the cloud or on-premises.""The most valuable features of Azure Backup for us are its flexible retention options and the ability to recover to a second region with geo-replication and read access.""When it comes to Azure Backup, the advantage is that it's native and it's very easy to configure. We don't require a separate tool or manage something on a separate server. At the backend, it's managed by Microsoft itself, and we don't need to manage it.""It's easy to deploy.""Azure Backup is good because it is entirely cloud-based, which means that you can be 99.9% sure that your backup is safe.""It is a stable solution...It is a highly scalable solution.""The solution helped us use R2 RBO to back up frequently.""Azure Backup is very simple to use and user-friendly."

More Azure Backup Pros →

"The ability to fully test your entire environment without actually performing a failover is invaluable.""The most valuable feature of Zerto for us is its DR capability.""Zerto saved us a lot of money compared to the cost of replicating at the LUN level. It also really simplified it and gave us shorter RTOs and RPOs.""Another advantage is the ease of use. You can click through instead of typing in the code. It's all already scripted down to the network adjustments within the VMs and the timed delays for servers that need to come up in sequence. Overall, it's a good package for us to use. We started using it in about 2018 and haven't looked back.""The most valuable feature is the ability to recover critical systems, such as public safety, within a few minutes. In addition, the RPO is six seconds of data loss, tops.""It does what it's purported to do, which is to provide continuous data protection. We have a five-second RPO. It's definitely doing its job.""Zerto is intuitive. We could set everything up in the environment within a day and a half and start migrating on the third day.""The DR - Disaster Recovery - is the main selling point."

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Cons
"Technical support can be slow to respond at times.""In the next release, I would like to see the ability to back up to different cloud providers.""The solution’s user interface could be improved.""The support for Office365 backup is atrocious and is something that has to be improved.""I once tried restoring a Linux environment, and the size of the Linux VM or the data disk was really huge. It took a really long time to restore the environment and send the data from the storage to the disk. It took around 25 to 30 minutes, which was much longer than I anticipated. They can improve the duration of such restore operations. In the next release, it would also be good if they could reduce the duration for transferring the data from their storage to the actual storage while creating a virtual machine. They can reduce the duration or increase the data transfer rate.""It would be beneficial to receive alert messages if something isn't configured correctly, for instance, if service principal names are missing, a message could prompt you to set them up.""Technical support is in need of improvement.""Azure Backup could improve by offering better integration for Oracle databases and enhancing features like granular restore and backup compliance capabilities."

More Azure Backup Cons →

"I have had problems with vRAs. When I am trying to restart a host, sometimes the vRAs will hang. I would like it if they wouldn't migrate off or shut themselves down, then I have to manually work with it a lot of the time.""Right now, our production environment runs on-premises, and we have a DR copy of everything that we run in production. However, our development runs on that hardware. In the case of a DR event, we would need to shut down development and bring up our secondary copy of production. We're hoping that Zerto is going to be the tool to help us do that.""The biggest improvement would be exporting VPGs and a configuration of VPGs, as well as increasing or improving their IP customization rule set.""An area for improvement is the support because it gets really expensive. They need to make it a little cheaper. Support also takes time.""Zerto's price has room for improvement.""Zerto's solution could benefit from additional security features, such as malware scanning tools at the recovery site.""It is expensive.""The only issue I've ever had is that I wish that Zerto would work more closely with VMware. There have been a few times that Zerto has released an update but it wasn't supported with that version of VMware. I would like them to coordinate their updates with VMware's updates."

More Zerto Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The pricing of this solution is ok, but I'm expecting that the price will decrease in the future."
  • "The pricing of this solution is good, and it is one of the easiest things that you can sell Azure with."
  • "This is an expensive solution in the Bangladesh marketplace."
  • "We are paying about $100,000 USD per year, just for a couple of servers."
  • "The price is pretty good, maybe $30 for a machine, I can't complain."
  • "It is a bit costly initially, but it is well worth it in the long run, especially for fighting against a number of threats, such as ransomware, which the IT industry is facing."
  • "Price-wise, it's similar to AWS."
  • "The price is somewhat high and could be lower."
  • More Azure Backup Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Pricing depends on your future growth. Start small and then scale up."
  • "Zerto’s licensing model has changed a bit over the last year and they are in alignment with others. It is pretty simple and more economical."
  • "Licensing is based on the number of VMs to replicate. The first thing should be to get the number of VMs to replicate based on your business needs."
  • "Licensing is VM based so you can buy packages or single VM. Price is not low but the power of application is high, so you will get your money back."
  • "It's a little bit expensive."
  • "We believe the pricing, setup costs, and licensing are easy to understand. The pricing seems very reasonable."
  • "The solution is very cost-effective and very easy to set-up but does not compromise on features."
  • "While we find the twenty-five VM license somewhat inflexible, the actual setup costs are minimal as the product is so easy to install."
  • More Zerto Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Veeam has a version for Azure but there are organizations, like ours, that are considering moving to an Azure environment and wonder if Azure Backup is better than Veeam Backup and Replication (Veeam… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable features of Azure Backup for us are its flexible retention options and the ability to recover to a second region with geo-replication and read access.
    Top Answer:I would rate the pricing of Azure Backup around six or seven out of ten in terms of affordability, considering the total cost. The pricing depends on factors like storage choices and retention needs… more »
    Top Answer: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 =… more »
    Top Answer:The most valuable feature of Zerto for us is its DR capability.
    Top Answer:We find Zerto's licensing model compatible with major cloud providers like Google, AWS, and Azure. The Azure pricing model is particularly cost-effective for us compared to other cloud providers… more »
    Ranking
    9th
    out of 133 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    13,197
    Comparisons
    10,502
    Reviews
    28
    Average Words per Review
    467
    Rating
    7.9
    2nd
    out of 133 in Backup and Recovery
    Views
    10,502
    Comparisons
    5,618
    Reviews
    128
    Average Words per Review
    934
    Rating
    9.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Zerto Virtual Replication
    Learn More
    Overview

    Azure Backup is a scalable backup solution with zero capital investment and minimal operational expenses that can help a company achieve maximal data protection. Azure Backup’s System Center Data Protection Manager provides optional integrations that can enable you to protect both advanced workloads running in your datacenter in VMs as well as those that are on physical servers.

    Azure Backup has many features that make it a most effective product. Included among these is its ability to easily scale up your storage capacity. It taps into the cloud to give you the ability to expand on a massive scale. This can be done without any monitoring or maintenance overhead.

    Benefits of Azure Backup

    Some of the benefits of using Azure Backup include:

    • The ability to control and track the performance of your network from a single centralized location. Azure Backup has a “single pane of glass” interface that enables users to monitor, operate, govern, and analyze their backups from one place. This eliminates any need to add additional management infrastructure. You can manage different workload types, subscriptions, vaults, and regions with Azure’s Backup Center.

    • A wide array of security features allows you to prevent malicious users from doing damage to the system, receive alerts if an unauthorized action takes place, and recover from any damage that results. Azure Backup has authentication requirements built in to protect vital functions, such as the ability to delete backed up data from unauthorized users. If something that impacts the backed up data takes place, users are immediately notified. Azure Backup saves any and all deleted backup data for two weeks. This enables administrators to use recovery points to recover their lost data.

    Reviews from Real Users

    There are a number of characteristics that make Azure Backup extremely effective. Two of these are the flexibility that it offers users and its overall effectiveness.

    PeerSpot user Ayman Y., an IT manager at NOMAC, notes all of the different backup options that Azure Backup offers. He writes, “It has many features. First of all, you can schedule a backup for the client as you like. You can do a backup from the whole virtual machine as an image. You can do a backup only from files and folders. It has every option. All options are available for the backup, for the restore, for the bandwidth utilization to do backups, even virtual machines or a physical machine. If you need to do a backup of the whole image from the virtual machine, all these options are there.”

    PeerSpot user Muzammil M., a senior operations engineer at the AlGosaibi Group, notes the effectiveness of Azure Backup when he writes, “Azure Backup is good because it is entirelycloud-based, which means that you can be 99.9% sure that your backup is safe. This is the reason that I suggest its use for companies that need to back up critical data.”

    Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, specializes in data protection and empowers customers to run a business by simplifying the protection, disaster recovery, and mobility of on-premises and cloud applications. Zerto uses advanced hybrid cloud IT technologies to recover and protect business-critical applications in on-premises and cloud environments, enabling them to deliver continuous service without compromising security. Zerto’s foundation is based on continual data protection (CDP) technology. Users can benefit from a single, unified, and automated recovery and data management experience across all virtualized or container-based workloads.

    Zerto's native clustering technology creates a resilient, fault-tolerant system that automates recovery of critical virtual machines while supporting software updates, new OS releases, and upgrades. With native clustering, a creation, migration, or deletion of a virtual machine is automatically replicated to all nodes in the cluster. This creates an automated failover and availability solution with the features of high-end dedicated servers running at a fraction of the cost.

    Zerto Features

    Zerto has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Continuous data security
      • Continuous replication
      • The industry's lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs
      • App and database protection and recovery on a granular level
    • Agility across hybrid and multi-cloud
      • Protection between clouds
      • Simple on-premises to cloud migration
      • User-friendly native cloud services
    • Simple to scale
      • Automation and orchestration are built-in
      • Cross-platform, multi-site analytics
      • Unified experience regardless of cloud
    • Software-based
      • Hardware, hypervisor, and cloud are all independent
      • No physical appliances
      • Future-proof

    Zerto Benefits

    • Robust disaster recovery: Continuous data protection enables recovery of entire clusters, multi-VM applications, or even a single server with the lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs. Zerto allows users to safeguard, manage, and recover all of their key digital assets, whether they’re recovering to a secondary location, the public cloud, or a managed service provider.
    • Constant backup: Instead of making backups every 12 or 24 hours, Zerto creates backups every 5-15 seconds. Zerto backup has no impact on production and eliminates the burden of micromanaging backup windows by using CDP instead of snapshots. Its backup provides immediate recovery of data, folders, or virtual machines (VMs) that are only seconds behind the original, which is a simple approach to completely avoid ransomware or erase inadvertent deletions.
    • Strong long-term retention: Send data to the cloud or a purpose-built storage appliance of your choice for months or years of retention. These long-term copies can be made from local backups or DR replicas, and they can be kept wherever is most convenient for your company. Its powerful indexing and search makes discovering and restoring data simple. For data you want to maintain but only use infrequently, use cost-effective cloud tiering to shift LTR copies from hot to cold to deep-freeze storage.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Zerto stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its disaster recovery abilities and its ease of use. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    Justin C., Director of IT at Arnott Inc. writes of the solution, “If we had to deal with a ransomware event, Zerto would be one of the first things I would use, because it is going to be the fastest to restore data to a certain point. If there were a fire in our building, Zerto would be a big thing too, because we would shut down everything that's in our building… It's definitely going to be one of our prevalent DRBC layers of protection."

    Brad W., Vice President of Information Technology at a financial services firm, notes, “The file restoration is very helpful. They've improved it over the years to make it a lot more user-friendly and easy to do, which I appreciate. So, we use that quite a bit. The failover process is quite simple and intuitive. Even the configuration and setup are pretty easy to do.”

    Sample Customers
    Russell Reynolds Associates, Somerset County Council, Kardem, PCL Construction
    United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company29%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    Construction Company14%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Insurance Company12%
    Healthcare Company10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Healthcare Company7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business44%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise37%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise56%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise25%
    Large Enterprise52%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise56%
    Buyer's Guide
    Azure Backup vs. Zerto
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Backup vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    771,157 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Azure Backup is ranked 9th in Backup and Recovery with 51 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Backup and Recovery with 236 reviews. Azure Backup is rated 7.8, while Zerto is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of Azure Backup writes "Straightforward to set up and manage and allows us to monitor all backups in one place". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zerto writes "Gives us business continuity capabilities during hurricane season and in case of ransomware". Azure Backup is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Rubrik, Commvault Cloud, Acronis Cyber Protect and Veritas NetBackup, whereas Zerto is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware SRM, Rubrik, Commvault Cloud and Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines. See our Azure Backup vs. Zerto report.

    See our list of best Backup and Recovery vendors.

    We monitor all Backup and Recovery reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.