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Bacula Enterprise vs Veritas NetBackup comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 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

Bacula Enterprise
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
24th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Backup (14th)
Veritas NetBackup
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
119
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Bacula Enterprise is 1.0%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Veritas NetBackup is 1.8%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Veritas NetBackup1.8%
Bacula Enterprise1.0%
Other97.2%
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Davilson  Aguiar - PeerSpot reviewer
Analista Tecnologia Banco de Dados at Centro de Gestão da Tecnologia da Informação
Very cost-effective and well organized with good compression
It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company. A managerial user who wants more information beyond the operational technician should be able to access it. It could include greater transparency regarding the volume of data trafficked on the network, as well as the expectation of deduplication. A more practical strategy could come with a backup policy model as a suggestion for both large and small companies. A simple suggestion is to visually implement the backup time as far as your physical media.
SunilPanigrahi - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees
Unified backups have protected virtual machines and applications and optimize storage efficiency
Regarding automated disaster recovery, we have not used Veritas NetBackup automated disaster recovery because according to the RFP terms and conditions, we are not supposed to have automated failover or failback, as we are a government entity and cannot violate the rules of the RFP. My feedback about granular recovery in Veritas NetBackup is that we have been doing verifications of the backed-up data to restore from point to point and time to time, focusing on file level or database level. When it comes to integration with cloud services, we have not started because we are a government entity and are not allowed to store any data in the cloud at this time. From security concerns regarding what I would improve about Veritas NetBackup, I think you need to look into this because we found only one encryption option available, which is not that very strong. When I initiate a backup from my laptop or server to the appliance or the tape media using Veritas NetBackup, the encryption channels are not strong, and there are not many options available. Whatever is there is by default and not changeable. We cannot modify any encryption facilities, and security is a big concern nowadays, so you need to look into that. Regarding the functionality part of Veritas NetBackup, I think this encryption feature should be stronger and integrated from point to point, not just at specific levels. When I initiate a backup, all the communication channels involved should be encrypted until it reaches the endpoint, meaning from client to server, server to client, and client device.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Bacula is pretty stable."
"It works great and it provides you with several standard tools to restore your backup, even after a big failure."
"It is easy to scale Bacula Enterprise even if your system is growing tremendously in data and servers."
"It can be used in virtually any environment we have onsite."
"It brought many advantages - such as the learning curve being very light."
"The solution has extensive documentation and a very active community."
"Bacula is very solid, very stable, and very scalable."
"The most valuable features are the special plugins such as SAP HANA databases, Microsoft SQL, and various types of virtualization."
"The deduplication feature is useful. Deduplication and compression features are what I like about NetBackup."
"The solution offers very good storage efficiency, so there's excellent compression and deduplication within the product that our clients really appreciate."
"The most valuable features are the VMware VADP backups and the support for data domains."
"I have found it to be the simplest solution to the market. It gives us a complete end to end solution. We are using this solution, Veritas Appliance and another one for access archiving. It is convenient to have all the support from one vendor."
"The product is stable and reliable."
"Its most valuable features are flexibility and reliability."
"The solution offers the hardware and the software at the same time."
"The VM portal and the CloudCatalyst are two of the solution's most valuable features."
 

Cons

"It could improve its interface or offer a specific screen for the manager of the company."
"Easier setup and configuration, perhaps including a GUI, would be an improvement."
"We would like to see an improvement in the functionality of the GUI."
"The initial setup could be a bit easier."
"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."
"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."
"Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability."
"The pricing is a bit of a concern. If could be lower."
"The virtual environment, cloud integration, copy data management features need improvement."
"I also think they could improve the reporting. They use a web-based software application OpsCenter for the reporting and I see that they haven't made any changes in years."
"In terms of improvement, it's very difficult to make it work with multiple business units. Its security model is too constricted."
"It would be helpful, in future releases, if the solution could add WORM (Write Once Read Many) support right within the product."
"The licensing costs could be more affordable."
"They need to improve their support. In the beginning, their engineers had trouble understanding the issue we were presenting. It took a lot of conversations for them to start troubleshooting the problem."
"It gets a lot of new features, but improvements in basic functionality are often sacrificed for a shiny new bullet point to put on sales presentations."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an open-source solution."
"We have a perpetual license."
"The price of NetBackup is okay. I think it's a little bit expensive but manageable. It has a lot of features, and the backup is better than most applications, so I think the price is competitive."
"Veritas NetBackup is very expensive, and I think price is the main reason which some customers don't want to use this solution."
"Our primary complaint about this product is that it is too expensive."
"It is slightly more expensive than Commvault, but it is pretty much the same. It is an enterprise solution, so it scales quite well. It has a lot of features. So, you pay for what you get. It is not cheap, but it is fit for the purpose."
"Licensing fees are charged based on the number of CPU cores."
"The solution is expensive compared to other alternatives."
"The price is fair."
"It is very expensive. The licensing cost for this solution is on a yearly basis. It is approximately 50k. We will continue using it at least for the next year, but we are currently doing an analysis to switch to some other solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
University
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise66
 

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.
What needs improvement with Bacula Enterprise?
Many features have been converted to commercial licensing, which restricts their availability.
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...
What is the best next generation backup tool?
Assuming you have an onprem ecosystem which runs the VMware, physical systems on Win, Linux and Unix and run both traditional DB's and nosql DB's like mongo, then Netbackup (NBU) will be the right ...
What do you like most about Veritas NetBackup?
The most valuable feature of cloud integration is the ability to send data outside of your location. This can be achieved by integrating cloud tier options or other object storage solutions.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Veritas NetBackup?
I would rate pricing for Veritas NetBackup around six, as it is neither high nor low.
 

Overview

 

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.
Beta Offshore
Find out what your peers are saying about Bacula Enterprise vs. Veritas NetBackup and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
882,260 professionals have used our research since 2012.