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BDRSuite Backup & Replication vs Zerto 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

BDRSuite Backup & Replication
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
7th
Ranking in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
MSP Backup (1st)
Zerto
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
2nd
Ranking in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
299
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Backup (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Disaster Recovery (DR) Software category, the mindshare of BDRSuite Backup & Replication is 1.5%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 10.4%, down from 12.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Disaster Recovery (DR) Software
 

Featured Reviews

Redha Benlaksira - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to maintain multiple restore points is critical because it lets customers choose to restore their data to an hour or a day ago
BDRSuite is better than competing solutions because it can protect, back up, and recover data. A feature called live migration allows you to recover the same data in different environments. For example, I can back up the data from a VMware machine and restore it to a Hyper-V. You can also create repositories and back up environments to a cloud platform like GCP and AWS S3 buckets. BDRSuite allows you to back up virtual machines hosted on an EC3 instance or Microsoft 365 mailboxes, SharePoint, etc. The solution allows us to recover data instantly. We can recover all our data in under 15 minutes. In a virtual environment, we can recover a virtual machine and all its data in under 15 minutes. It's the same for a NAS, SAN, or DAS disk. The ability to boot instantly enables customers to maintain their business operations without interruption. BDRSuite's ability to maintain multiple restore points is critical because it gives customers the option to restore their data to an hour or a day ago. They can choose a full, incremental, or synthetic backup. Incremental backup makes sense if you are backing up the same data daily and you want to save space and network resources. It only backs up the differences or updates in every block. I've worked with lots of backup solutions, and BDRSuite is the easiest to use. It's simple to install and create backup jobs. It doesn't require many tasks to install the solution. You can easily back up and restore from one console
Sachin Vinay - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most important feature, in terms of the hypervisor, is the ability to restore a virtual machine in a matter of minutes. We can take the backup of a virtual machine and we can restore it to the actual Vembu Backup server as a temporary solution, in a matter of minutes. We can just spin up a VM in no time; different hardware, even different processors. It's pretty dynamic in that sense."
"Adding and removing backup jobs using BDRSuite is easy and also includes great documentation."
"We invest in the backup so the continuity of the data is not affected."
"It made it easy for us to handle the daily backup of endpoints."
"The most valuable feature is the Hyper-V backup - it's just one click. I don't have to worry about it."
"I get my backups done."
"The ability to map a drive and restore a separate file is most valuable. The restoration activity is good."
"The best thing about it is that it has been adaptable to our business model. We are in industrial networking, and they were adaptable to give us offline installers and offline licenses. That has been the biggest thing. They also allow us to order the licenses on a perpetual basis."
"The ability to test that my backup regime is actually doing and working as I want it to do is valuable."
"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."
"Zerto's ability to test failovers with a record of how long it takes to fail the motor is beneficial, as it allows us to know the timing in the event we have to do it live."
"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."
"We were able to see its benefits immediately after we deployed it."
"We don't have to spend a whole lot of time worrying about DR and whether or not we are covered. Zerto just works. As it is replicating, we don't need to spend a whole lot of time with it. That is a huge benefit as far as daily management."
"The Move feature is the most valuable feature because it allows us to move the VM from our old environment to our new environment with minimal disruption."
"With Zerto, all you have to do is deploy the executable and start setting things up. So, it was very easy."
 

Cons

"I have had issues where it was working and then it stopped and I had to diagnose what had changed or gone wrong to get it back up."
"I have seen that the BDRSuite user interface can be less intuitive and more challenging to navigate compared to other similar products."
"The phone [support] system is a negative five on a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst. They wanted me to leave a message. When there is a problem with the product and you call in, you want to talk to somebody or wait to talk to somebody, not leave a message."
"The process is a bit cumbersome when you remove an agent, delete that job, and add the agent to the same server. Even though the agent is already installed in that server, the system does not recognize it. We have to uninstall the current agent, restart the server, install the push agent - a new agent - and then restart the server. I think they should try to avoid that."
"There are bugs. For one month, I encountered a big issue where my storage pool could not be identified. My backups were stopped because they were not able to locate the storage pool. So, I removed the settings and started the backups again. The application is not stable. It needs some debugging and testing on the build side of production."
"Vembu software runs on a Windows Server. The Windows Server has to be connected to the internet so it can connect with Vembu’s servers. It has to connect with Vembu. For some reason, if it doesn't connect, it stops working, and I don't know why on earth they do that. They require it to connect to the internet and connect with Vembu for it to continue to function. If the internet is down or if the server can't reach the internet, it stops working after a few days. That's not great because there are some people who want to do backups but they don't want to have their server accessible on the internet."
"It's not that stable yet. Every two weeks, my backup will stop and I have to check it."
"They need to improve their marketing because not many people are aware of it. People ask me what is Vembu, and I have to explain to them it is a good tool for backup and other things."
"Some of the features need improvement. One would be, as you're creating a Move group or a VPG, as they call it, it should either autosave or have the ability so that you can save it for coming back to later because if the setup times out, you lose all your work. That would be a nice improvement to have."
"I would rate them an eight out of ten because not every response is as we expect. They do resolve the issue, but sometimes customers have unusual questions, and they are not able to say how exactly to fix that or how to do something,."
"If there is a mass of changes to a server, Zerto will restart the replication. It would be nice to know why that happens."
"Migration of complex VMware and Hyper-V solution. Using Zerto to replicate to azure and S3."
"Zerto needs to improve its documentation."
"I would like to see different reporting options than what is currently available."
"Zerto can improve the dashboard by making it even more simple. Right now, there's a lot on the dashboard, and it can be overwhelming. If you're an experienced user, then you'll find it easy to use, but if you're a beginner, it will take you some time."
"Another thing that would help would be a recommender, or some type of tool that says, 'Hey, you're not conforming to best practices.' It would do a conformance or compliance check to tell you if your VPGs are set up according to best practices and whether your Zerto clusters are set up optimally. It would see if you have HA enabled and whether your alerting is turned on."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price for BDRSuite is justified."
"Take a look at the pricing and licensing closely. When we installed the BDR disaster recovery server, which is the duplication of the backup data on one server onto a second one where the backup data resides, it was not clear that this DR server needed two other licenses. These licenses were to back up the copy of the first backup server that had two licenses for the two physical host that it was backing up in the first place. Moving files around to a second DR server, why would I need an extra two licenses? I don't know if it's to make money, but it was not very obvious and I had to abort the project from there because I didn't plan to pay for extra licenses to copy data of the first two physical servers. I also didn't understand why it was needed. Hopefully, they will improve the explanation in the documentation for this."
"It is very cost efficient, effective. I’d say it's one-third the cost of Veritas when compared to the server backups. I even tried image backups on Acronis, but Acronis is very expensive. So these are some of the key reasons why I opted for it."
"It is affordable. It has value with respect to the features included in the software."
"The licensing model is quite complicated; it's not simple. An example: If you have a physical server, you have to pay more for that license than you do for a host. It could be running several VMs and that could be a server VM as well. Then, for web station machines, there is no license for those machines and they have no desktop OS - the free version has all this functionality. Their license model needs to be looked at and simplified."
"Vembu is too expensive because they don't really have small-business pricing. This is a matter of personal opinion. They're going to tell you that they have competitive pricing because there are more expensive solutions in the marketplace, but there are better solutions in the marketplace that are more expensive. Their product is a better fit for small businesses, but they don't price it that way."
"At the moment, I am doing Vembu for one host. My costs are about $25 USD a month for a single host up to 100 VMs."
"I do remember that the pricing was based on a VMware or Hyper-V license, whereas on our end, it should be regarded as a VM-based license. I don't know why they make a difference at the Vembu level. We are currently on VMware migrating to Hyper-V, and we didn't want to buy licenses for VMware, but still have to buy them for Hyper-V. This the only thing which does not seem fully adequate."
"License-wise, we budgeted $1,000 per VM. The minimum spend on it, in the beginning, can sometimes be a little bit of a headache for people, and they might have to budget creatively to get there, but once you're there, the renewals are worth it."
"Having backup and DR is somewhat moderately important to us. The problem with us, and a lot of companies, is the issue with on-prem Zerto. It utilizes whatever you have for a SAN. Or, if you are like us, we have a vSAN and that storage is not cheap. So, it is cheaper to have a self-contained backup system that is on its own storage rather than utilizing your data center storage, like your vSAN. While it is somewhat important to have both backup and DR, it is not incredibly important to have both. I know Zero is trying to heavily dip their toes in the water of backup and recovery. Once you see what Zerto can do, I don't think anyone will not take Zerto because they don't necessarily specialize in backup and recovery 100 percent. They do replication so well."
"The pricing is very reasonable."
"It is not the cheapest product; it is not the most expensive product, but it works. It is a mid-range product, and it is justified in terms of being pretty quick and easy."
"The pricing for this solution could be cheaper. They have two licensing tiers. When we purchased it, they didn't have a license for the cloud model. Certain things that I used to get with the basic licensing are no longer available. They are only available in the Cloud. Overall, the licensing model could be simplified."
"At close to $1,000 a license, it makes it very hard to protect all of your environment, especially for a smaller shop."
"Zerto is a little expensive."
"I wouldn't say I like the licensing pricing structure. Every year, it increases exponentially, which bothers me a little. It's worth it in terms of the value, but I worry the price will increase even more often after the Zerto merger. I still think it's worth it and that the solution is cheaper than the others."
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Comparison Review

it_user159711 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
87%
Retailer
3%
Educational Organization
1%
Financial Services Firm
1%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BDRSuite?
The best part of BDRSuite is how user-friendly it is and how it does not require any maintenance after the initial setup.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BDRSuite?
BDRSuite is cost-effective because you can purchase a perpetual license that covers multiple environments. You only renew the support costs annually. It offers advanced features at roughly 75 perce...
What needs improvement with BDRSuite?
I had a small problem integrating VMware and Hyper-V when customers used a free VMware license to create VMs. This is a problem because many customers use the free version of VMware. There are also...
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.
 

Also Known As

Vembu BDRSuite
Zerto Virtual Replication
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NASA, Intel, CISCO, PHILIPS, Atos, HEXAWARE, Motorola
United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
Find out what your peers are saying about BDRSuite Backup & Replication vs. Zerto and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.