Bacula Enterprise vs IBM Spectrum Protect comparison

Bacula Systems and IBM are both solutions in the Backup and Recovery category. Bacula Systems is ranked #28 with an average rating of 10.0, while IBM is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.2. Bacula Systems holds a 0.8% mindshare in BRS, compared to IBM’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Bacula Systems users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Bacula Enterprise

Read 10 Bacula Enterprise reviews

1,064 Views
922 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Protect

Read 149 IBM Spectrum Protect reviews

4,584 Views
3,530 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Bacula Enterprise

IBM Spectrum Protect

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

IBM Spectrum Protect and Bacula Enterprise compete in the data protection category. Based on user reviews, IBM Spectrum Protect is favored for deployment and customer service, while Bacula Enterprise is preferred for pricing and feature robustness.

Features: Users praise IBM Spectrum Protect for its comprehensive data backup and recovery features, scalability, and reliability. Bacula Enterprise stands out for its flexible and customizable backup solutions, extensive platform support, and advanced scheduling capabilities.

Room for Improvement: IBM Spectrum Protect users mention improvements needed in documentation quality, system setup complexity, and a steep initial learning curve. Bacula Enterprise users point to the need for enhanced technical support, better integration capabilities, and more effective user support structures.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Spectrum Protect users commend the straightforward deployment process and professional customer service. Bacula Enterprise users report a more technical deployment requiring specialized knowledge but value its extensive documentation. Customer service received mixed reviews for Bacula Enterprise.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Protect users find it pricier with a slower ROI due to higher initial setup costs. Bacula Enterprise offers cost-effectiveness and faster ROI, seen as a budget-friendly option with competitive features. Despite higher costs, IBM's feature set and support merit consideration for more extensive enterprise needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Bacula Enterprise vs. IBM Spectrum Protect Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Bacula Enterprise vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

January 2025

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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

Bacula Enterprise

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

28th

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Backup (18th)

IBM Spectrum Protect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

149

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Bacula Enterprise is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

Roni Alvarenga Ferraresso

Director of Information Technology and Telecommunications at Câmara Municipal de Campinas

Easy to use with many useful plugins and extremely helpful technical support

A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed. I would also like a mobile application to manage the Bacula Enterprise environment where I could perform backups and restores directly from my cell phone or tablet. Relying solely on a desktop is a bit frustrating as its GUI isn't exactly responsive. They need a clearer and faster restore screen to get the information about the data we want to restore; it's a little uncomfortable to find the files to restore on the current screens.

Read full review

Syed Habib

Head of Infrastructure Security (S.A.V.P) at EXIM Bank Ltd

Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking

It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."

"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."

"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."

"Bacula is pretty stable."

"The most valuable features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."

"It works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."

"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."

"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."

"I've had no problems with the stability of this solution."

"Replication processes with container storage pools allow reduction of storage space and network bandwidth, using deduplication and compression."

"We do not lose data. That is why we are using this product and have a backup in place."

"It has increased our security, scalability, and high availability."

"Instead of taking three different backups of your systems, you're taking only one. You're able to crack that open and get what you need. The incident recovery, where it creates the VM and then you're running it, technically you're running it on Spectrum Protect. But then in the background, it's doing the storage motion and moving it off the Spectrum Protect back to your VMware environment. The users don't know the difference."

"It is also a product that has been maturing for a long time. This is good because customers need reliability in their enterprise initiatives."

"The main feature of this product is a flexible architecture and functionality that allows you to solve problems of any complexity and scale. Most importantly, it is not just a product that simply makes a backup, but it restores and saves a large number of services in critical situations. By the way, it works fine with different types of clouds, supports S3."

"It provides our customers with the comfort of having reliable enterprise data protection."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pros

Cons

"The initial setup could be a bit easier."

"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."

"A more user-friendly interface (GUI) can be developed."

"We are looking for a unique interface that can rule both enterprise and open source editions. Such a thing does not yet exist."

"Bacula needs a graphical user interface because, for administrators, the command-line interface is okay, but for the average user it is not very easy."

"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."

"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."

"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."

"The previous GUI that they had was slow, and it did not have enough information on it."

"We cannot take VMware backups for our banking data center environment."

"I am looking forward to new features in the next release. One of the main features is the cloud storage integration, which was one of my main required features. I've had more difficult experiences with other platforms than with this one."

"Most customers still struggle with the reporting piece, especially generating reports. I think it needs some improvements in this area."

"The GUI has long been a problem for TSM/Spectrum Protect."

"An area for improvement would be the ease of use - the GUI is not up to the mark compared to other products in the market."

"Software-wise, IBM Spectrum Protect didn't handle virtual machines that well. The license cost is mainly the area for improvement in IBM Spectrum Protect."

"The solution's initial setup process wasn't easy...The solution is overly complicated in terms of architecture, especially compared to other tools in the market."

More IBM Spectrum Protect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."

"We have a perpetual license."

"The licensing fees are between $8,000 and $10,000 per year."

"We pay for a terabyte license to support our backend usage."

"The product is not cheap."

"I rate the pricing a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is not cost-effective, and ten is cost-effective."

"IBM provides an open license policy, which is more like a gentlemen's agreement."

"IBM Spectrum Protect has a fixed price and includes no additional costs."

"We are paying for support and maintenance on a monthly basis."

"That's no longer my department, but I have some past experience with licensing. It is not cheap. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of licensing. In terms of additional costs, there is management overhead. It is a complex solution and a lot of work goes into managing clients. It has gotten better over the years, but compared to its competitor, it is still heavy on management overhead."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

University

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Bacula Enterprise?

Bacula is more expensive than various other solutions. It’s almost completely commercial now. Products like Veeam software are much more expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Bacula Enterprise?

Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Bacula Enterprise?

The last scenario in which I used Bacula was for a customer who needed some open-source tool which could support encryption at that time. We managed to convince the customer to use Bacula to deploy...

See all answers

What do you like most about IBM Spectrum Protect?

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Protect?

It's expensive. I acknowledge the cost associated with it.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?

See all answers

Comparisons

Bareos vs Bacula Enterprise

Compared 55% of the time

UrBackup vs Bacula Enterprise

Compared 18% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Bacula Enterprise

Compared 13% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Bacula Enterprise

Compared 3% of the time

More Bacula Enterprise Competitors

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 20% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 18% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 11% of the time

Rubrik vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Protect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Backup and Recovery

February 2025

Download Bacula Enterprise product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Spectrum Protect

February 2025

Download IBM Spectrum Protect product report

Also Known As

No data available

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Overview

Bacula Enterprise is a highly scalable, especially robust and secure data backup and recovery software. Its unique low cost subscription model empowers data centers to truly escape data volume price traps. With a high degree of flexibility and customizability, Bacula offers native integration with a wide range of hypervisors, databases, file systems, cloud interfaces and containers. High numbers of enterprise organizations worldwide (incl. NASA, Bank of Austria, Swisscom or Sky PLC) have adopted Bacula Enterprise backup software in mission critical environments because of its advanced features and ability to handle high data volume at very low cost.

Bacula Systems

IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) family. It enables reliable, cost effective backups and fast recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.

IBM

Sample Customers

NASA, SwissCom, Navisite, Turner Studios, Bank Austria, Caixa Bank, SdV Plurimedia, Leibniz University Hannover, Zeta Global, Tricore, NetLog, Siemens, LocaWeb, wbsGo, itesys, Queens School of Computing, Escrypt.

CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology

Buyer's Guide

Bacula Enterprise vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

January 2025

Free Report: Bacula Enterprise vs. IBM Spectrum Protect

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