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Commvault Cloud vs Microsoft Exchange comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 4, 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 File Archiving
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (3rd), eDiscovery (3rd), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery as a Service (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (3rd), SaaS Backup (1st), Threat Deception Platforms (1st), Container Backup Software (1st)
Microsoft Exchange
Ranking in File Archiving
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
91
Ranking in other categories
Email Applications (3rd), Wireless Email (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the File Archiving category, the mindshare of Commvault Cloud is 20.1%, up from 14.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Exchange is 10.4%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
File Archiving
 

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.
Hesham Hussain - PeerSpot reviewer
A good solution for large enterprises, but is expensive when compared to other solutions
Regarding the decision of increasing the number of users, it depends on the organization's choice, whether to opt for CapEx or OpEx. Both options involve expenses over the years. Building an in-house Exchange solution requires investing in hardware, storage, connectivity, and administrative resources. Office 365 shifts the budget solely to OpEx as a subscription service. Scalability is another factor. Starting a new company favors Office 365 due to cost efficiency. As the organization grows, the choice depends on available resources and technical expertise. An internal Exchange setup is feasible with skilled engineers, while Office 365 suits those lacking in-house resources.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The convenience of backing up and restoring simultaneously is very valuable."
"It is much more scalable and flexible than everything else in the market."
"It is just about as flexible as you can get; simple. You can put it anywhere you want. You can put it on-prem or in your cloud. I could see where a team that's looking for more of a follow the bouncy ball type of solution might get a little confused. "Oh, no. What do you mean I might have to do it this way or I can't do it that way?" Sometimes, people just want to be told what to do. For an enterprise environment, like we are at NDOT, everything we do is not standard. It is not industry standard; it is not normal. We have all kinds of one-offs. We do need flexibility in the solutions that we get. I will say that Metallic has been extremely flexible in that sense, where we are able to follow the bouncy ball if we wanted to. Obviously, we didn't. We did it our way and Metallic, as a whole solution, provided that to us with no issues."
"The most valuable feature is the ability it gives me to automate backups well and consistently, and to follow up on them as well. It also provides consistent recovery processes. Whenever we have needed to do a restore, it has worked quickly and efficiently."
"The solution is very stable and offers a good level of performance."
"With the use of the cloud, the solution is easy to learn."
"It integrates redundant storage and preserves jams in a storage area, providing up to 70% compression rate."
"The most important feature is that everything can be controlled using a single console."
"We've been using Exchange as an email platform. Our clients require multi-country, multi-regional email collaboration with controlled mail flow. The most valuable feature is the capability of message tracking and the protection of user data."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It gives me benefit in terms of integration with other services such as SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive. It makes my work much easier."
"It has a feature that allows you to retain an email and recover it as an administrator. When you activate this feature, even if a user deletes an email, the email is still in the system, and we can retrieve it as an administrator. It is a very useful function. We turn this feature on for some of the mailboxes because we need to keep all the records. I like the way emails are classified in this solution. It makes it really easy to take a look at the most important messages. This is a really good functionality. Some of the emails directly exchanged with you are marked as important and shown in one tab, and everything else is in another tab. We usually don't have any issue with Exchange. It can be integrated with different solutions."
"The search tools are good."
"It's an excellent product from Microsoft. It provides more flexibility to the end-users. As it's connected with Teams, it also enables collaboration."
"Microsoft Exchange has good performance and is user-friendly."
"The setup was straightforward."
 

Cons

"Just to keep it running is time-consuming. There are five people on my team. Commvault was supposed to be one of the less time-consuming solutions, but in reality it takes 60 percent of our time just to keep it running, and that's not even fine-tuning it; that's just to keep it running."
"The pricing could be more flexible in terms of licensing."
"Commvault Complete Data Protection would benefit from improving their training resources."
"It would be nice to have just one email report come in, then we can filter out failures. If everything is backed up, we really don't need to see the report. If it is in a single report. A simpler customised report would be good."
"We've run into some issues when attempting to restore very large numbers of files. Of course, that's more of a design issue."
"Setup is complex."
"The HTML interface is a remarkable improvement. However, there are still some features that are not available in that interface that are available in the Java console, but I'm sure that will come with time."
"Our main pain point is that some of our hardware is old. For example, the SSD disks for our application database are slow. It's hard to avoid a slowdown in our environment because the size of our backups is growing every year. If you're growing and don't upgrade the environment, you will see slower backups and restores. You must enhance the environment if you are growing."
"From a security point of view, Microsoft should enhance the new features. Technical support could also be better."
"It doesn't work very well on a virtual machine. We had to move it around. There are also issues when you try to move it between computers."
"In terms of probability, every now and then there are changes coming and going. The changes are not that frequent because every month they got updates back, so that is an issue."
"When we started using Exchange on the cloud, we had a lot of initial problems relating to our main database and we also experienced issues with the accidental deletion of inboxes, amongst other things. In fact, many of the files we had moved to the cloud had disappeared. There also seems to be a problem with the retention of information."
"The management of .pst files and archiving need improvement."
"After 2022, users of Microsoft Exchange have to migrate mailboxes to Microsoft Exchange Online, and what I'd like to improve is for Microsoft to publish more on-premise versions for customers using Microsoft Exchange. Having more security is another room for improvement in the solution, particularly for mailboxes that develop the Exchange Edge rule to protect internal mailboxes. What I'd like to see from Microsoft Exchange in the future is for Microsoft to still update the latest, existing version which is 2022. I'd like Microsoft to still push more cumulative updates for Microsoft Exchange 2022."
"Microsoft could make it easier to combine comments in the GUI. It isn't easy to do certain things in Exchange, primarily if the administrator isn't used to the command line, so I think the customer interface could be improved."
"It's not always the finest solution in terms of integration with products that are not from Microsoft. It integrates very well with Microsoft products but not with third-party products."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The license is paid on an annual basis and the price is reasonable."
"One of the issues with backup vendors is that they overprice, or overvalue their products."
"The tool is affordable."
"Metallic is an affordable solution."
"It is a bit more than other products, but when you consider the time savings, it is saving money."
"The cost of an integrator license is moderate and its features cover most customers."
"Our cost is around $20,000 per month. The previous year, it was around $30,000 per month. It now costs less because Commvault changed the licensing type for providers."
"The product is very competitive for pricing in some countries because it is possible to set up Commvault hardware with other vendors using its certification."
"I rate Microsoft Exchange a four out of ten for pricing because it is quite cheap, and many companies use the solution."
"Microsoft's licensing structure is too complex, but its prices are affordable, though not cheap."
"It's a little bit expensive."
"Since my company is on Microsoft Cloud, we pay for the licenses per user. Compared to volume licensing, I would say the present licensing cost is not expensive."
"Licensing fees are paid monthly."
"Exchange is better for medium to large businesses because it can be quite costly for SMB, which may not need all the options the product provides."
"The solution is expensive to maintain because it requires frequent updates and ongoing server maintenance."
"Its price is okay."
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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
14%
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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.
How does Zimbra Collaboration compare with Microsoft Exchange?
Zimbra is a free, open source collaborative software suite. The features I like best are the ease of integration and the email, calendar, and collaboration server with web interface. In addition, I...
What do you like most about Microsoft Exchange?
The initial setup was straightforward and fast.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Exchange?
The licensing and pricing are quite costly, which can demotivate customers from opting for features and upgrades. However, the solution provides value for money if one is well-acquainted with Excha...
 

Also Known As

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

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
Paderborn-Lippstadt Airport, Scitec Nutrition, British Airways, InnoGames, Osteology Foundation, Franz Haniel & Cie. GmbH, NTC Contracting
Find out what your peers are saying about Commvault Cloud vs. Microsoft Exchange and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.