Dell Data Protection Advisor vs Zerto comparison

Dell Data Protection Advisor

Read 303 Zerto reviews

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98% willing to recommend

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Zerto and Dell Data Protection Advisor serve in the data protection and disaster recovery category. Zerto has the upper hand in user satisfaction due to its features, while Dell Data Protection Advisor is favored for its broader functionality despite the higher price.

Features: Zerto users highlight its strong replication, disaster recovery capabilities, and simplicity. Dell Data Protection Advisor users value its extensive reporting tools, integration capabilities, and detailed analysis.

Room for Improvement: Zerto users need improved support, faster updates, and better customer service. Dell Data Protection Advisor users suggest better documentation, more user-friendly features, and enhanced usability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zerto is noted for quick and straightforward deployment with reliable customer service. Dell Data Protection Advisor has a more complex deployment process but benefits from detailed documentation and responsive support.

Pricing and ROI: Zerto offers cost-effective pricing with a good return on investment. Dell Data Protection Advisor is more expensive but provides value through advanced features and integration capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell Data Protection Advisor vs. Zerto Report (Updated: April 2025).

Dell Data Protection Advisor vs. Zerto

April 2025

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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

Dell Data Protection Advisor

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

24th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Zerto

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

2nd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

303

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (3rd), Cloud Backup (2nd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Dell Data Protection Advisor is 0.5%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 3.0%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

ErmiasGirma

System and Cloud Deployment Engineer at Safaricom Ethiopia plc

Proactive support with predictive insights and seamless integration

As a system engineer, I am deploying Dell Data Protection Advisor solutions, especially in the areas of protection like Avamar, NetWorker, and Data Domain. Our team has deployed these solutions for three organizations in Africa and India Dell Data Protection Advisor provides proactive support by…

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Sachin Vinay

Assistant Manager-Networks at Amrita

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.

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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

"The initial setup is very straightforward. Deployment typically takes about one hour. You just need one person to handle the deployment process."

"It has a lot of stock reports. I believe over 300 canned reports, which for the most part meet a lot of generic needs."

"The deduplication is probably the most valuable feature of that requirement."

"This is a stable solution."

"The product's ability to give predictions and advice on how to protect data is incredible."

"The most valuable aspects of the solution are the compression and the duplication."

"I can increase the tool's licensing as per my requirement with no conditions applied."

"The reporting feature and the Dell's continuous improvement of the solution are the most valuable features. The solution not only supports Dell Power Products but also other products."

More Dell Data Protection Advisor pros

"One of the valuable features is the ability to re-IP on the fly, because it makes the migration a lot smoother on the system end."

"The replication feature and DR functionality are most valuable. Zerto has many options when a new server is being provisioned."

"Zerto is easy to use and user-friendly."

"We own another solution called VMware Site Recovery Manager, SRM. We have licenses for our entire environment and we still decided not to use it. That's how big the difference was in the experience that Zerto provides."

"Zerto offered us massive time saving and consistency. We have a consistent outcome every time we complete conversions."

"It's good for reliability, timing, and simplification. For reliability, it's a logical construction that behaves productively. It's a critical system where timing and coordination are necessary. It also offers simplicity to design and analyze the system by clearly defining the relationship between events and conditions."

"In terms of continuous data protection, it's the best product that we've found that does this. It's not snapshot-based. It's continuous, so there are no specific points in time we have to worry about recovering to or from. It's pretty much any time, as long as it's within our replication window."

"The ease of use, ease of setup, and the dashboard, which is quite user-friendly, are valuable features."

More Zerto pros

Cons

"There is a steep learning curve to use the interface and to create new reports, this could be made easier. If the solution could provide more drag and drop functionality to build more advanced reports that would be very helpful."

"The solution requires more integration with our other solutions. I know that they have full integration with VMware because it is also from EMC. However, we have to have better integration with Microsoft and Nutanix as well."

"Dell Data Protection Advisor's feature for data domain protection needs enhancement."

"We have encountered issues where we were unable to pull data from the database server. It should also improve the backward compatibility."

"It is difficult to manage the solution with the available tools. You need to know exactly what are you are doing."

"Customization of reports or creating new reports can be difficult. Users need to have a deep knowledge of SQL. 70-80% of customers can't seem to understand how to do it. They don't know how to address reporting. If Dell EMC could simplify it, it would benefit the end-user."

"Some minor adjustments could be made regarding the graphical interface and customization options."

"They should empower their customers with the ability to upgrade this solution as long as it's in the same major release."

More Dell Data Protection Advisor cons

"The number one thing we have found we would like changed so far is the cost per VM. It would be great to get that pricing reduced."

"The replication layer can probably be improved."

"The problem with the backup product is that it's not very mature and you really need a specific use case to be able to use it effectively. It's hard to explain to our customers, especially our large customers, that the use case is so limited."

"I would suggest improving automatic updates. Their software requires updating level by level to keep it current. I was unaware that I was several versions behind, so I needed assistance to guide me to the current version."

"I don't like the evacuation process. The host evacuation process could be a little simpler too. It takes our maintenance a bit longer, when we are doing host maintenance, because we still need to evacuate the vRAs manually. I know they tried to make it more automatic, but it is not quite there yet."

"You have to start with 25 VMs which is too much for SMB clients. It would be better if they had the option to start with 10."

"Analytics has a 90-day window, where it keeps data. It would be nice to have on-prem storage instead of cloud storage for that so we can keep the data for longer. Unless you discover the problem within three months, you don't know that you need the data. Then, it is gone by the time you realize there is an issue."

"The only negative I would give is that with the latest version of the appliance, setting up authentication was a bit of a challenge, but that is just a matter of using Keycloak and how things have changed."

More Zerto cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product pricing has been satisfactory, particularly with the economy of scale in our agreement."

"For pricing, I would rate Dell 2 out of 5. It's affordable."

"You have to procure the license when you are ordering or quoting for Dell Data Protection Suite (DPS). DPS is bundled with the suite and comes with a license. However, if you purchase NetWorker separately then you will have to procure the license for DPS separately."

"You need to make an upfront payment for three, five, or seven years and renew the licenses for support. We can do an annual maintenance contract with Dell. I would rate the product's pricing a six out of ten."

"The product is affordable."

"If the customer has huge lineup of Dell Products then they receive discount on the pricing."

"It's not very expensive — I think the price is fair."

"Zerto is a little bit expensive [for our budget] but as far as the value that it provides, it is completely justified by all of the savings."

"Zerto does a per-workload licensing model, per-server. It is simple and straightforward, but it is not super flexible. It is kind of a one size fits all. They charge the same price for those workloads. I feel like they could have some flexible licensing option possibly based on criticality, just so we could protect less important work. I would love to protect every workload in my environment with Zerto, whether I really need it or not, but the cost is such that I really have to justify that protection. So, if we had some more flexibility, e.g., you could protect servers with a two-, three-, or four-hour RPO at a certain price point versus mission-critical every five minutes, then I would be interested in that."

"It is less expensive than the full solution that we had previously, but at the same time, it's not an inexpensive product either."

"We believe the pricing, setup costs, and licensing are easy to understand. The pricing seems very reasonable."

"Licensing is based on the number of VMs to replicate. The first thing should be to get the number of VMs to replicate based on your business needs."

"We found that in an event that was massive enough to cause an entire cluster to go offline we would be happy with our core services up and running."

"It was pretty appropriate. It was not too cheap, not too expensive. It was just about right."

"We paid a big investment upfront with renewal fees each year."

More Zerto pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user159711

Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Dell Data Protection Advisor?

The platform's most valuable features are data protection and retention.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell Data Protection Advisor?

The product pricing has been satisfactory, particularly with the economy of scale in our agreement.

What needs improvement with Dell Data Protection Advisor?

The product could be improved by addressing intermittent collector failures affecting status reports' accuracy. Additionally, enhancing bulk update capabilities for items like cost centers would be...

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.

Veeam Data Platform vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Comparisons

Compared 27% of the time

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Compared 19% of the time

Dell NetWorker vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Compared 15% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Compared 14% of the time

Veritas NetBackup vs Dell Data Protection Advisor

Compared 13% of the time

More Dell Data Protection Advisor Competitors

Veeam Data Platform vs Zerto

Compared 15% of the time

VMware Live Recovery vs Zerto

Compared 13% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Zerto

Compared 10% of the time

Rubrik vs Zerto

Compared 8% of the time

Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines vs Zerto

Compared 6% of the time

More Zerto Competitors

Product Reports

Dell Data Protection Advisor

April 2025

Download Dell Data Protection Advisor product report

Download Zerto product report

March 2025

Also Known As

DPA

Zerto Virtual Replication

Overview

Effectively managing your data protection environment can be labor intensive and complex. It requires knowledge of backup applications, replication technologies, and the entire supporting infrastructure, yet it is critical in keeping your data secure.

With Dell Data Protection Advisor, you can automate and centralize the collection, monitoring and reporting of this data and get a single, comprehensive view of your environment, no matter where your data resides. This includes monitoring data on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

With clear visibility, you can gain actionable insight and effectively manage service levels while reducing costs and complexity. You can also collect and report on that data to help other stakeholders make the best decisions for your organization.

Data Protection Advisor is available as part of Dell Data Protection Suite.

Dell Technologies

Zerto is used for disaster recovery, business continuity, data migration, and ransomware recovery, providing continuous data protection and near real-time replication. Valued for ease of use, efficient failover processes, and versatile integration, it enhances organizational efficiency, reduces errors, and boosts productivity.

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Trek Bicycle, Cal-Israel Credit Cards

United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies