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CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs Microsoft OneDrive comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

CTERA Enterprise File Servi...
Ranking in Content Collaboration Platforms
12th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
File System Software (2nd), NAS (9th), Cloud Migration (7th), Cloud Storage (10th), Cloud Backup (13th), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (9th), Cloud Storage Gateways (2nd)
Microsoft OneDrive
Ranking in Content Collaboration Platforms
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Igal Muginstein - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers flexibility, fast performance, and ransomware protection
The platform is releasing new features at a fast pace, which sometimes leads to version updates every three to six months. Although updates are generally not complex, it is challenging to stop the production environment during these updates, even if the downtime is just a few minutes. This is a common challenge across all NAS providers. From my perspective, the most important area for improvement is developing a method to perform updates without affecting customer production environments. Additionally, there are some cache size limitations that might become problematic for future use cases, though they don’t impact current applications. Collaboration for NFS and SMB protocols could also be enhanced. Although this issue isn't specific to CTERA, it is something we are working on together to improve. The quality of the versions has improved, but occasional issues still arise. All solutions face this challenge, but we hope to see a continued reduction in the number of bugs. That said, we haven't had any major production problems in the last four years, and we appreciate how responsive CTERA is to our issues. We engage in brainstorming sessions together, and we value this relationship.
CJ Aulisa - PeerSpot reviewer
Keep organized and have access to important files wherever you are
From my own personal experience, I have a story that tells about how and why the product can be improved and it mostly has to do with customer care. This is about a situation that really caused me great aggravation. I am an independent consultant, so I have OneDrive in my business set up and I pay monthly and it bills monthly. I foolishly let my granddaughter get a robot gaming account under my Microsoft account. Because she is only nine years old and she has autism, she really does not understand what she is doing sometimes. She kept buying points for a game she was playing a lot of and I did not know she was doing it. She would go buy $200 a day in robot points, and then I got on my robots bill and found out what was going on. They would not let me separate the accounts so I could stop the billing. If I canceled the account, I would have to cancel her account, and then she would lose all the things that she had done and accumulated in the game. So I removed the credit card, let that account die out, and then started a new account. I made a new password and all that stuff to start over. When you get a new account, they give you a 30-day free trial. Because I use it and knew I wanted it I already bought PowerPoint in the project and they built that. When the trial came near to the end, they sent me an email saying "your trial is coming to an end" and I called them just to make sure that the PowerPoint purchase was not considered part of the trial that they were talking about because I didn't want to lose anything when I let it lapse. They assured me that everything was good. When the trial came to an end. They removed all the files and I had been working on with a client analyzing their IBR (incremental borrowing rate). So I lost all my trees and they totally removed everything I'd spent hours on. I called and tried to find out what was going on. They spent an hour or two on the phone with me trying to go different ways calling different departments to find out where they might still have the data. Turns out they did not. They lost it. So my caution about the product and trial periods is to be careful. Because I had multiple Microsoft accounts, when the first tech checked and looked it up they thought I had a valid license for the new Microsoft account. They were referring to the old one. There is my lesson learned. Besides that episode, I like working with Microsoft products. But then another thing happened. I had another customer and they wanted me to set up on their desktop. So I created a Microsoft account for them so I could use their client email and their OneDrive and all that stuff in their name. For the life of me, I could not get that removed off my desktop after I had it installed. I had to call Microsoft to try and get it working right again. I could not do a regular delete to get rid of the stuff from the other account. It does not let you delete it. So every time I logged in from scratch, it sent up an error saying I had the wrong password for this account. I just do not need that account anymore and there was no way to get rid of it or regain control of the login. They were terrible for support after COVID hit. I want to write an article on the companies that achieved during COVID and then the companies that used it as an excuse to provide poor customer service. Microsoft would be under that jurisdiction. In the end, I would use it again if it worked and I got my password straight. It works great but with the product, you get the behemoth Microsoft customer support services. I have not contacted them lately, so I do not know if they got it working right. When COVID hit, they just went off the deep end claiming they could not fill support requests. Otherwise, I think Microsoft is pretty good. I can not think of anything that I could make OneDrive better. Besides having different outcomes from these experiences with Microsoft products, I have been happy with them.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a three-in-one solution for us. It is a file-sharing platform, an archiving solution, and also a backup solution."
"The features I find most valuable are in the gateways themselves. They have done a great job over the years of providing insight into what is happening with our products, with the batches that come through that are scanned. I enjoy that part of it, and it is fairly easy to use from our standpoint once we get to know the product."
"The solution provides substantial flexibility, allowing the separation of workloads across various hardware platforms without vendor lock-in. This flexibility makes it adaptable to future infrastructure changes."
"CTERA's instantaneous and redundant file replication, available across multiple geographical locations, ensures easy and user-friendly recovery."
"CTERA is a very scalable product, allowing us to grow."
"CTERA has out-of-the-box data protection capabilities."
"The solution provides data eviction, where unused data is evicted from the local file, freeing up space. It also allows data to be rehydrated from the cloud when needed."
"The CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is a hybrid solution that supports both on-premises and cloud environments."
"Scalability is good just because it is a cloud-based product."
"It's quite easy to use and then of course it is quite well integrated to the rest of Office 365."
"It helps you keep organized."
"It is good as a central hub for the storage of documents and sharing among team members."
"The feature that I have found the most valuable is that Microsoft OneDrive works with any Enterprise Cloud Solutions Office app. You can edit a document on the cloud, share documents with your colleagues, and monitor changes. You can access your work almost anywhere. You can also sync Microsoft OneDrive with your workstation so that whatever you are working on gets automatically backed up to the cloud at regular intervals. So even if your system crashes, you still have a copy of your documents in the cloud, which I found very useful."
"It's pretty easy to learn. Once someone taught me, I was able to navigate it quite easily."
"With this solution, the sharing of documents if very easy to do. There's a lot of collaboration you can do with your colleagues."
"It gives you access to important files from virtually anywhere."
 

Cons

"The web portal that our users access to view data and backups could be optimized. CTERA could apply some of the improvements made to their administrative interface on the user side. The administrators are a much smaller group of people than the users, so it would be helpful if they targeted user experience resources to them."
"It has a learning curve."
"The new Edge filer that they have comes with a lot more features than what we purchased. It would be better if we are able to add those extra features without having to swap out the hardware. A clear upgrade path for legacy customers would be beneficial."
"One suggested improvement for the CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform is the ability to distribute data across multiple active backend storage nodes rather than the current limitation of a single active node."
"Stability-wise, we just went through one issue that they addressed. We were having cloud sync issues."
"I am looking for a process where version upgrades do not impact the customers. There is no downtime."
"It would help to have a global single-pane-of-glass view of all my CTERA devices. We have different regions, and we must log in to each portal to see what's happening with those. It would be nice to have a single portal to see the health of the devices, versions, and firmware upgrades. Sometimes, we want to dive into something more complex, like investigating why CTERA storage usage grew from 2 terabytes to 4 terabytes in a week. That's a little challenging. It's something we would like to see on the road map."
"However, in some cases, they could improve performance."
"The security is not as flexible as it is with Dropbox, which means that we can't share our OneDrive files."
"OneDrive is a bit behind competing products like Dropbox and Box."
"Microsoft OneDrive could improve because it doesn't support backing up .PST files, which are Outlook data files, and email archives. This is a substantial setback when it comes to Microsoft OneDrive."
"The scalability has room for improvement."
"An online video player would be great, since sometimes you have to download the video to play it."
"Recent functionality changes have actually made the product more confusing to use."
"I think it should be more user-friendly with more tutorials on the full scale of the program."
"Performance is an issue when sharing a large number of files in a single folder."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I find the pricing reasonable. They offered us deals that helped us. Especially with the upgrade to a bigger unit last year, they were helpful with the deal."
"So far, pricing seems to be fine."
"It is fairly priced. I am not too involved in the pricing of what we used to pay, but it would have reduced the cost of ownership. I cannot give a figure, but the EMC solution was very expensive compared to CTERA."
"It is hard to compare the costs if we want to retain the same model of a separate high-performance storage or certain things, but it is one of the cheapest solutions available in Israel."
"CTERA's pricing model is competitive compared to other companies that achieve the same thing. Their closest rival is Nasuni, and CTERA is significantly more affordable than Nasuni."
"CTERA's pricing seems to be on par with some of the other players, such as Nasuni and Azure. They all have benefits, but CTERA is competitive for its features."
"OneDrive comes with Microsoft 365 so it is just an added part of that package."
"Using this software, it has had an amazing impact moneywise on our business. It allows us to share documents without the need of extra hardware."
"It is free if you are using Office 365, and you get a terabyte of storage with your account."
"This is a pricy solution, given that we are only using it at 50% capacity."
"The licensing is expensive and on a yearly basis."
"We pay a lot for the Enterprise version, but it is a premium service."
"Costwise, it is a great option. In most cases, it is a free space, which will be more than enough for most customers."
"The price of Microsoft OneDrive is reasonable and compatible with competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
68%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Educational Organization
4%
University
3%
Educational Organization
57%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
3%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
I find the pricing reasonable. They offered us deals that helped us. Especially with the upgrade to a bigger unit last year, they were helpful with the deal.
What needs improvement with CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
One of the bigger things that I would like to see is additional logging. There are logs in there. They provide us with the initial logs on what is happening on our CTERA device. I appreciate that, ...
What is your primary use case for CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform?
We use CTERA in almost every site we use. It is the platform for every commercial site that we have in the world. We have around 198 of their devices locally, and we also have CTERA devices in our ...
What do you like most about Microsoft OneDrive?
The backup capability is one feature I love about OneDrive. I also like how it syncs when you're working offline. Everything is updated once you connect again.
What needs improvement with Microsoft OneDrive?
It takes too long for OneDrive to synchronize various applications, especially when you are saving office data. It also requires too much bandwidth.
What is your primary use case for Microsoft OneDrive?
We use OneDrive to share documents throughout the organization and collaborate. It is also used for backups.
 

Also Known As

No data available
MS OneDrive
 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

McDonald's, WPP, US Navy, Gore, Festo, Stryker, Bezeq, PERI
Chevron, Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, DBS, Nestle, Lowe's, MGM Resorts, Textron, MGM Resorts
Find out what your peers are saying about CTERA Enterprise File Services Platform vs. Microsoft OneDrive and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.