Cohesity DataProtect vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager comparison

Cohesity DataProtect vs. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

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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

Cohesity DataProtect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

10th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Backup (7th)

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Deduplication Software (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Cohesity DataProtect is 3.7%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is 4.6%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

Giovanni Golinelli.

Hybrid IT Architect at Quanture Spa

Easy to use, offers good scalability and responsive support

The deployment depends on the environment. Deploying on VMs is relatively simple. But for most of our customers, we implement physical clusters with at least three configured hosts using the existing model. So, it depends on the setup. Implementing DataProtect itself wasn't particularly challenging. One key requirement for successful DataProtect deployment is proper network configuration. If the network setup isn't right, you won't achieve optimal performance. We have developed a service for some of our customers where they implement an appliance or physical cluster of Cohesity at the customer site. Then, we use cloud clustering to replicate, and even in production, a second copy of the protected data. And in some cases, we have developed some disaster recovery procedures using Cohesity.

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MinaMagdy1

Senior System Engineer at Nutanix

Comprehensive integration and user-friendly dashboard enhance data protection workflows

PowerProtect Data Manager lacks the tape-out functionality, which is important for organizations relying on it for offsite backup. While PowerProtect Data Manager offers a workaround, it's not always accepted, notably by sectors like banking. Additionally, I would like PowerProtect Data Manager to provide microservices and container backup for modern applications.

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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

"It's completely reliable and easy to restore."

"We can run test scripts on production data."

"The system automatically takes down the nodes one at a time and performs the upgrade and brings the node back up before proceeding to the next. Upgrades can now be done at any time with a high level of confidence."

"Several features enable us to perform fast recovery, such as instant fast recovery. All our virtual machines protected with the product can be quickly restored to another healthy environment with minimal downtime for our main customers. These features have significantly improved our recovery time objectives."

"A robust, verifiable backup with a restore solution, which decreases our backup and has a restore window."

"The most valuable features are the rapid VM restores and the ability to quickly find files and download them directly to my desktop so that I can put them where I need them to be."

"The tool is faster and easier to use than others. The most critical feature for our data protection needs is the accuracy of backups and restores."

"Cohesity DataProtect is easily manageable, and you can see every option from the user interface."

More Cohesity DataProtect pros

"The deduplication is the most valuable feature because it helps to control the overhead."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its integrated approach."

"I would say flexibility is the most important feature of the product. The performance and speed are the best on the market."

"Dell PowerProtect Data Manager helps to reduce the amount of data being transferred and stored."

"The most valuable features of the solution are flexibility and data protection."

"Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager is user-friendly and easy to use. it does what it needs to do."

"The solution adequately handles data storage."

"The product's initial setup phase was easy."

More Dell PowerProtect Data Manager pros

Cons

"The solution has a more complex setup than Veritas and Veeam."

"Microsoft Exchange online mailbox backups would be fantastic."

"I like that Cohesity offers the chance to have data on-premises and on the cloud. All the data is automatically sent to the cloud."

"You need to put the full name instead of a few letters while searching for backup. It should also improve customization."

"A little more documentation on standard faults would help, as new features are being released quite often."

"If someone were to change an admin account password, I would like an alert raised for that, which is not available at the moment."

"Cohesity cluster upgrades have not been as easy as a single button click. They are a manual process that requires upgrading each node into a cluster individually."

"The GUI is in need of improvement."

More Cohesity DataProtect cons

"The main issue that needs improvement is the support system. When I raise a ticket, it sometimes takes a while to get a response."

"The Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager reports could improve. There should be different kinds of reports on failures, such as dashboards that we can submit to top management or auditors."

"The solution should enhance its user interface and make it more flexible."

"You need to use additional software to back up entire environments. It will be good if they could support entire tape libraries."

"PowerProtect Data Manager is missing a feature for takeout, which means I cannot store backup data off-site within the software. This is a limitation for organizations that require off-site solutions."

"The tool's scalability has certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required."

"A lot of improvement is required in Dell's first level of support."

"As a new product, there are some things that still need to improve a bit as it matures."

More Dell PowerProtect Data Manager cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Sizing is important and it is easy to overestimate."

"Pricing, setup costs, etc. are pretty typical. The initial cost for Cohesity was less than other products the we evaluated. Cohesity's pricing does offer benefits as DR target costs are less than other solutions. You are not charged for DataProtect licensing for target DR data consumption."

"Cohesity came in at the best price. Setup was included and done in half a day."

"With respect to pricing, make sure that you look at both Rubrik and Cohesity as they are very similar and are quite competitive."

"Cohesity came in at the best price."

"Licensing is per node and per protected terabyte. You will also pay 10-15% annually for support."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."

"There is monthly licensing."

More Cohesity DataProtect pricing and cost advice

"The price of Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager is reasonable."

"The product is offered at a very competitive price in the market."

"Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is not an expensive solution."

"The solution is not less expensive than competitors but pricing deals are available."

"The licensing costs and pricing model are based on capacity and the license is easy to upgrade."

"The solution is more affordable than other vendors."

"We offer monthly or yearly subscriptions. The price could be cheaper."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

44%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Educational Organization

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cohesity DataProtect?

Several features enable us to perform fast recovery, such as instant fast recovery. All our virtual machines protected with the product can be quickly restored to another healthy environment with m...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cohesity DataProtect?

Typically on-premises nodes/clusters are deployed for primary backup (to enable instant mass restore) so price will be dependent on chosen OEM and capacity required. MSPs like us utilise PPU licens...

What needs improvement with Cohesity DataProtect?

While there are improvements to be made, such as providing support for older systems like IBM iSeries and tandem systems from HP, the solution overall shifts from older methods to modern practices....

What do you like most about Dell PowerProtect Data Manager?

One notable feature is its robust backup support for Kubernetes and container environments. Additionally, PPDM stands out for its ease of deployment and management compared to other backup solution...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell PowerProtect Data Manager?

The price of Dell PowerProtect Data Manager is generally perceived as reasonable. However, specific figures are not available as I am on the technical side and do not handle costs.

What needs improvement with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager?

The main issue that needs improvement is the support system. When I raise a ticket, it sometimes takes a while to get a response. Scheduling for support calls can be problematic when it does not al...

Rubrik vs Cohesity DataProtect

Comparisons

Compared 27% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 15% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 6% of the time

ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage vs Cohesity DataProtect

Compared 3% of the time

More Cohesity DataProtect Competitors

Dell Avamar vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 22% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 18% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 14% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 13% of the time

Zerto vs Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Compared 2% of the time

More Dell PowerProtect Data Manager Competitors

Product Reports

Cohesity DataProtect

Download Cohesity DataProtect product report

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager

Download Dell PowerProtect Data Manager product report

Also Known As

Cohesity

PowerProtect, Dell EMC PowerProtect

Overview

What is Cohesity DataProtect?

Cohesity DataProtect is a top-level, sophisticated, software-defined backup and recovery solution created for cloud environments. Cohesity DataProtect is made to hyperscale and is one the most thorough policy-based protection solutions available on the market today.

Cohesity DataProtect melds multiple-point products into a single software that is able to be deployed as on-premise or consumed as a service.

Top Features:

Hyperscale made easy: Cohesity DataProtect improves data protection by doing away with the need for backup silos and administers backup and recovery with a single user-friendly, easy-to-understand interface. Cohesity DataProtect provides extensive 24/7 enterprise-class protection for a large, varying set of sources, including virtual and physical servers, NAS and SaaS workloads, relational and distributed databases, and traditional and containerized applications.

Super fast recovery: Cohesity DataProtect offers near-zero recovery point objectives (RPOs) and near-instant recovery time objectives (RTOs) to satisfy your business service-level agreements (SLAs). Using Cohesity Helios’ unified data plane and control plane you can immediately search and recover data on any Cohesity cluster, located anywhere. DataProtect distinctively minimizes downtime by immediately mass restoring any amount of virtual machines (VMs) to any point in time, and lowers data protection costs by as much as 70% or more.

Backup as a Service: Feel free to take advantage of the elasticity of the public cloud and the cost-effective value of Cohesity DataProtect when delivered as a service. When you choose an OPEX option, you can eliminate the need for on-premises hardware. There is a SaaS option that will allow you to very simply configure your backup workloads and immediately begin protecting your vital all-important data and applications.

It’s as easy as: sign-up, connect, and protect!

Ransomware protection: Cohesity DataProtect offers stellar recovery at scale. The solution is so intuitive, it has machine learning-based anomaly detection to stop incidents before they happen. Cohesity DataProtection can provide immutable backups, Datalock write once, read many (WORM), encryption, and role-based access control (RBAC).

Cohesity DataProtect integrates well with many of today’s top solutions, including, but not limited to:

Hypervisors: VMware vSphere (5.5 and later), Microsoft Hyper-V (2019, 2016, 2012 R2), Nutanix AHV and RHeV

Kubernetes-based data and application state

Cloud: AWS EC2, Amazon RDS, Azure VM, and Google Compute

Physical: Windows, Linux(RHEL, CentOS, OEL, Debian, Ubuntu), AIX (7.x), and Solaris

Databases: Oracle (11g R2, 12c), Oracle RAC and SQL (2008 or later)

Distributed Databases (NoSQL and Hadoop): MongoDB, CouchbaseDB, Apache, Cassandra, Cloudera, and Hortonworks.

Bare Machine Recovery: Windows and Linux

Applications: MS Exchange (2010 SP3 or later), MSFT Active Directory, Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, Groups), SalesForce (SFDC), and SAP HANA

Primary storage: Pure FlashArray, HPE Nimble, and Cisco Hyperflex

NAS: Pure FlashBlade, NetApp, Isilon, IBM GPFS, Google EFS, Elastifile, and generic solutions*

Reviews from Real Users

One reviewer, who is head of IT infrastructure at Kampmann says, “Cohesity really is a Next-Gen Data Management Software,” and goes on to indicate that Cohesity “works flawlessly with easy replication of backups and numerous supported backup sources.”

Another user, who is a senior network engineer at a legal firm, relates that "Cohesity is a robust and feature-rich solution"

Cohesity

PowerProtect Data Manager offers efficient data protection capabilities leveraging the latest evolution of Dell trusted protection storage architecture.

With operational simplicity, agility and flexibility at its core, PowerProtect Data Manager enables the protection, management and recovery of data in on-premises, virtualized and cloud deployments, including protection of in-cloud workloads. You can also protect cloud-native workloads across multiple public clouds via our integrated SaaS based PowerProtect Cloud Snapshot Manager.

Modernize how you protect your VMware virtual machines using Transparent Snapshots. Transparent Snapshots simplifies VM image backups for near-zero impact to your VMs or VM resources – and it works with any VMware supported storage. Transparent Snapshots innovation increases backup performance, lowers costs and simplifies management and reduces the risk of data loss.

Streamline data protection directly for applications or Kubernetes containers to Dell PowerProtect appliances and reduce application resource constraints.

Increase business resiliency with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery capabilities to rapidly recover from cyber incidents.

Modular design allows agile delivery of new features and updates. Rapidly evolve to meet future IT demands.

Software defined: Provide flexible data protection and compliance across applications and cloud-native IT environments
Multi-cloud optimized: Extend protection to the cloud with backup to cloud, backup in-cloud, long term retention and cloud disaster recovery
Self-service: Backup and restore directly from native applications
Cloud-Based Monitoring and Analytics: Telemetry, machine learning and predictive analytics to proactively take action and speed time to resolution

Reviews from Real Users

“We keep an eye on the future, and we are confident that PowerProtect Data Manager and PowerProtect DD series appliances will support our transformation project. Both products are continuously evolving and will cover our future needs, including using the cloud for data protection.” – Dimitris Mavromichalis, IT Deputy Manager at National Bank of Greece

“PowerProtect Data Manager combined with PowerProtect appliances – that’s cutting edge. That’s world leading as far as we’re concerned.” – Drew Hills, Infrastructure Analyst at USC Australia

““Most of my wish list came true with the PowerProtect Data Manager plugin for vSphere, which provides perfect integration with vCenter.” – Dave Chapman, Senior Technician at PSC Publishing

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Tribune Media

National Bank of Greece, USC Australia, PCS Publishing, Dell Digital IT, Rushmore Electric, Melanson Health, Arrow Electronics

Cohesity DataProtect vs. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager