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Commvault Cloud vs Microsoft DPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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

Commvault Cloud
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
eDiscovery (3rd), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery as a Service (3rd), File Archiving (2nd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (3rd), SaaS Backup (1st), Threat Deception Platforms (1st), Container Backup Software (1st)
Microsoft DPM
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
27th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Commvault Cloud is 7.4%, up from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft DPM is 1.2%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Featured Reviews

Cassandra Cinar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides excellent visibility and helps reduce costs and time
We use intuitive administrative tools that readily reveal the volume of backed-up data. Our Commvault CommCell servers alert us to failed backups and provide detailed information. This transparency allows our managed service provider to easily grasp our pre-established thresholds and readily scale up with new technologies. We're highly satisfied with Commvault's automated data security and management policies. They meet our stringent requirements for secure and private data storage, including anti-ransomware protection and encryption. Notably, they also ensure compliance with GDPR for backups stored in Europe and other regions, fulfilling our regulatory obligations. Threat Scan's ability to scan backup data for threats is invaluable because it proactively identifies and neutralizes certain viruses and threats that may originate from our G Suite or be reported by our security incident response team, preventing potential outages. Commvault provides excellent visibility across our entire organization's data. They perform regular health checks, informing us of areas of strength and offering recommendations for improvement. These recommendations may include upgrading to newer product versions or addressing issues identified during the checks. It is important for our organization that Commvault provides a unified platform for recovery across cloud, on-premises, and software-as-a-service workloads. This is particularly important because many of our existing cloud environments rely on basic backups that are insufficient for our needs. Commvault empowers us to address this issue. We have implemented it not only in our own operating company but also across the corporate structure, rolling it out to virtually all AWS users. This is because the standard backup methods, such as snapshot backups, fail to meet our stringent requirements for recovery, service level agreements, and crucial functionalities like threat detection and other security features. Commvault ensures a robust and comprehensive backup infrastructure that satisfies all our essential needs. It has improved our organization by ensuring we meet our infrastructure requirements, adhere to our vulnerability methodology, and achieve service level agreements for both backup and storage requirements. The quarterly risk analysis allows us to effectively manage the lifecycle of both data and backups. It also sheds light on the types of data and backups we have, providing valuable insights. Commvault's risk analysis is one of the tools we use to meet our compliance requirements and implement the necessary controls for immediate security policy action. To ensure comprehensive data protection and comply with international regulations like GDPR, we rely on Commvault alongside our established financial systems and SOC-compliant practices. Commvault has helped us reduce our organization's data management costs by 75 percent, particularly for long-term backups. We ditched tapes and virtual tapes thanks to Commvault, replacing them with a fully disk-based backup system and cloud backups in AWS and Azure. By implementing Commvault, we've significantly reduced our backup times. This is achieved through a combination of incremental backups and data aging. Aged data is then moved to cheaper disk or cloud storage, ensuring cost-effective long-term retention while still meeting our recovery SLAs. While the overall time savings may be around 10-15 percent, the main benefit is not keeping everything on expensive primary storage and efficiently aging it out. Consequently, retrieving data from the Azure bucket typically takes five days or more, reflecting our agreed-upon SLA. It has reduced our recovery point objective, allowing us to store more backups. However, new regulatory and compliance requirements mandate that some backups cannot be deleted and must be retained indefinitely. To address this while still improving efficiency, we've implemented solutions for long-term data storage and improved data management practices. Commvault has helped our organization not only decrease our threat detection time but also improve threat prevention to such an extent that we often avoid facing the full impact of a threat altogether. By preventing these incidents, we're often unsure of the precise amount of time saved, but the benefit is clear: we don't need to activate disaster recovery mechanisms. It has not only helped us reduce our recovery time objective, but it has also ensured that our backups and long-term storage are secure, thanks to its comprehensive capabilities. In terms of total cost of ownership, Commvault has enabled us to significantly reduce both hardware and media costs for storage and backup. After factoring in encryption and compression, the total savings amount to close to 80 percent. It has been able to reduce downtime, but having a quick recovery plan and policy and SLAs that are published are met regularly.
RifkanHasan - PeerSpot reviewer
Backup and recovery that is stable but support is no longer in existence
The DPM is pretty good, but when it comes to external devices, you can't back up to the external device. It's a huge drawback because once everything goes down, it goes down fully. We can't take a snapshot and take it outside, which is a problem. Also, when it comes to recovery, the recovery process doesn't work properly. It doesn't recover. One of our drives failed and when we wanted to recover it from the other drive, it never worked. So, we couldn't recover the data. Recovery of data if the server goes down, is not very good. The DPM is good apart from the support services. We were told that the support was no longer in existence, which is why we are looking for another provider. In the next release, I would like to see backup to external devices, so it can always restore the backup and we can take it externally and store it somewhere that it is off-site and archived. Currently, it does not allow us to do that because it is required to be in one location.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What is most valuable to me are the search features, where you can search through large backup data sets and find what you're looking for. Our data sets are so big that we're over the petabyte mark. To find a specific file for a specific user out of 10,000 users is a challenge... If we can glean from them a general description of where it might be, the search feature comes in very handy to actually locate it and restore it for them."
"Well documented SQL views and customizable reports, together with scripts and workflows provides ability to automate processes and ensure proper controls are in place."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to backup over the dedicated Fiber Channel directly from SAN."
"We have VMware, Hyper-V, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL. We have a lot of different systems, and all of them are supported under one licensing agreement. That's one of the benefits."
"Restoring is very fast. In testing, I did a restore for a single item from a mailbox. Within a minute, I had the message back in my mailbox. So, it didn't take hours or days. Obviously, there will be a limit. If we suddenly go into DR and have to restore five terabytes of emails for people, then it will take a couple of days, which would be acceptable. For general usage, where we have to do the odd restore, we have never had issues. It happens within minutes."
"The most valuable feature of Metallic is its flexibility and user-friendly."
"Commvault can actually come in and assist you with aspects of the implementation - and they are quite helpful."
"The most valuable feature is the deduplication ratio. It saves most of our space and reduces the network traffic."
"One of the most effective features of Microsoft DPM is its integration with the entire Microsoft ecosystem."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is the recovery."
"I could back up all the stuff we had, even the VMs we have for Hyper V."
"I like the core backup feature. I also like the file server backup feature. I find Microsoft DPM interesting because it has fantastic integration with Microsoft products. For example, in Exchange and SharePoint, DPM is excellent when it comes to backing up data. It also does a decent job with open-source products."
"This solution helps us to manage all of the operations across servers and different workstations."
"Microsoft DPM is scalable."
"The most valuable feature is the total integration of the System Center solution."
 

Cons

"There could be improvements to the backup failures."
"The navigation of it needs improvement in terms of the UX. The product itself, it works as expected. It's all user experience and user interface improvements that could be made and it could be made a little more consumer-friendly."
"When you deploy Complete Data Protection for past services, it's more complicated because you cannot directly back up from the previous service host. We have to build a proxy server, like a middleware, to directly access the past database server. It's complex and hard for beginners to figure out."
"You need quite a lot of human resources to maintain a Commvault environment, to keep it operational. Also, it would be nice to if there were an easier way set up some Commvault components."
"We've run into some issues when attempting to restore very large numbers of files. Of course, that's more of a design issue."
"They need to integrate configuration screens or videos (free training courses, webinars, demos) so that engineers with little experience can fully exploit the features that are offered or managed within the license that was acquired, and thus have better quality and completely satisfactory experience."
"Could be easier to implement."
"The setup was a little bit difficult for a non-IT person like me. My OneDrive is protected by multifactor authentication, and to get the backup to begin behind that multifactor authentication took a little bit of almost customized support, even though I was following the instructions and the videos. That process could have been easier."
"You have only a few settings and if you change them for some special configurations, it's very difficult."
"The data tagging feature needs improvement. The solution could be a bit more intuitive in certain aspects."
"Compatibility and integration with other products needs improvement."
"To evaluate the solution's abilities and its performance under demanding conditions, it is recommended to carry out a stress test."
"We can't take a snapshot and take it outside, which is a problem."
"The problem lies with the 2019 version, it's the file system they’re using."
"It would be better if it integrated seamlessly with open source and competitor products. In the next release, I would like to see some data governance frameworks. It should have support features for data integration and data replication like Veeam. Right now, we are also using Veeam for certain scenarios."
"The user interface can be improved quite a bit."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of an integrator license is moderate and its features cover most customers."
"Compared with other backup technologies, Commvault is a bit more costly, but we are satisfied with the support, the services, and the features that we get with Commvault."
"It is a bit more than other products, but when you consider the time savings, it is saving money."
"Commvault licensing is a perpetual license so only the support is being renewed yearly."
"Commvault is more expensive than Veeam, which is the reason that we are changing to Veeam for cloud environments."
"The pricing is fairly in line with the other products we've compared it with recently. We do spend more on it than we did in our Backup Exec days, but it's fairly competitive with some of the other best-in-class data protection platforms."
"...the battle came down to pricing, as well as some small features, and Commvault was the best in all the criteria."
"Our yearly cost is around €20,000... The cost is based on the number of users and the amount of data. They sell it per terabyte."
"Microsoft DPM can be considered as an expensive solution for smaller or medium enterprises, but we have been satisfied with the price structure as it is fixed and it offers a variety of useful features"
"Microsoft DPM is a free solution. However, we pay approximately $3,000 annually for support."
"I think Microsoft DPM pricing is reasonable. The additional costs are related to storage and technical support."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Commvault?
The tool is affordable. I rate the pricing a six out of ten. Implementation requires additional costs because we need Commvault Professional Services.
What needs improvement with Commvault?
Data center backup must be improved. We also want the product to provide us with a cloud-based backup. If we use Microsoft Exchange Online for email services, we want to know how to get a backup in...
What do you like most about Commvault Complete Data Protection?
IntelliSnap and file system backups are valuable features.
What do you like most about Microsoft DPM?
This solution helps us to manage all of the operations across servers and different workstations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft DPM?
Microsoft licensing is complex, especially for enterprise or data center solutions. However, it's not more complicated compared to other competitors and the market is well balanced.
What needs improvement with Microsoft DPM?
I am not sure if I am competent enough to address areas for improvement in Microsoft DPM.
 

Also Known As

Commvault Complete Data Protection, Commvault Backup & Recovery, Commvault HyperScale X, Metallic, ThreatWise
DPM, Data Protection Manager, MS DPM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aberdeenshire Council, Acxiom, BAM Group Ireland, Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, CI Investments, Clifford Chance, American Municipal Power, American Pacific Mortgage, AstraZeneca, Dongbu Steel, Denver Health, Dow Jones, Emirates Steel, Penn State Health, Prime Healthcare, Sonic Healthcare, Sony Network Communications, TiVO, UCONN Health, The Weitz Company
Medical Park, Centropol Energy, a.s., NCFE, D & H Distributing, Metalor, Colosseum, a.s., Sanitas S.A., Icebreaker
Find out what your peers are saying about Commvault Cloud vs. Microsoft DPM and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.