Dell NetWorker vs Zerto comparison

Read 298 Zerto reviews

9,448 Views
4,596 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Dell NetWorker

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Dell NetWorker and Zerto compete in the data protection and disaster recovery category. Dell NetWorker has an upper hand in support and competitive pricing while Zerto is preferred for its advanced features and real-time capabilities.

Features: Dell NetWorker offers comprehensive data backup and recovery functionality, scalability, and integration with various environments. Zerto provides robust disaster recovery capabilities, real-time replication, and ease of migration across different platforms.

Room for Improvement: Dell NetWorker needs enhancements in initial setup complexity, a more intuitive management console, and detailed customer support documentation. Zerto could improve its reporting features, strengthen customer support documentation, and expand its platform integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Dell NetWorker's deployment is complex but has strong customer service support. Zerto offers easier deployment and efficient migration functionalities but has mixed reviews on customer service quality.

Pricing and ROI: Dell NetWorker is more cost-effective with competitive setup costs and good ROI. Zerto has higher setup costs but is considered worth the investment due to its advanced features and capabilities, providing significant ROI in complex disaster recovery scenarios.

To learn more, read our detailed Dell NetWorker vs. Zerto Report (Updated: March 2025).

Dell NetWorker vs. Zerto

Download the complete report

Helped 842,592 peers since 2012

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 NetWorker

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

12th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

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

298

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Migration (4th), Cloud Backup (2nd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of Dell NetWorker is 3.1%, up from 3.0% 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

Offers seamless integration and cost-saving benefits with enhanced recovery capabilities

Currently, in my organization, I am using Dell NetWorker for open-source solutions like PostgreSQL and MySQL databases, and some large VM environments. It also supports the Dell library and is used for the library archiving system Dell NetWorker allows for extensive customization, supporting…

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"NetWorker's most valuable feature is recovery, including the policy-based backups that can be configured."

"Deduplication is the most valuable feature of this solution."

"The solution is simple to understand."

"The initial setup is simple."

"Taking backups is faster."

"Very user-friendly with a good interface."

"Data domain is a good feature."

"NetWorker is fast and reliable."

More Dell NetWorker pros

"We used Zerto to protect VMs in our environment. It depends on the network and environment, but the RTO takes around 7-8 seconds. When you compare Zerto to other solutions in the market, it's very powerful."

"There wasn't anything in place that compares to what we're getting from Zerto. Before Zerto, we didn't have a proper disaster recovery program or application in place. We had a simple backup solution where we could back up our data every 24 hours. So we went from that to being able to recover full systems within a matter of minutes. With Zerto, if we do have an event or disaster, we know that we can recover from that much quicker than we were able to before."

"The replication feature where it constantly replicates and sees that data is always in sync is valuable."

"I like that the failover is simple and that it's a stable platform. It makes it easy for us to do failovers in the event that we have an issue. It also makes it easier to do test failovers because we can test it prior to actually doing a real failover. This means that we can pull things back or commit them over on the other side. Zerto streamlines the process instead of having to have a whole team of people who are dedicated to disaster recovery."

"The most valuable feature is the rollback feature that captures every couple of minutes. Whenever we have a server that goes down, we can use that to pull it back a couple of minutes before and it's good to go."

"If we lost our data center and had to recover it, Zerto would save us a great deal of time. In our testing, we have found that recovering the entire data center would be completed within a day."

"There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better."

"A new feature is the One-To-Many VPG allowing a VM to be replicated at up to three different locations, including local."

More Zerto pros

Cons

"While upgrading to a new version, we encounter challenges related to specific algorithms or code regulations."

"Ports are not visible to the network, which requires a dedicated physical server."

"The support is an area with concerns where improvements are required."

"The UI needs some enhancement to be more user-friendly."

"There are some limitations regarding scalability of the product."

"The management of Dell Networker is quite cumbersome."

"The user interface of this solution could be improved. It is not user friendly and is difficult to understand for new users. New users struggle to understand the logic."

"We have faced problems with the initial configuration of the solution."

More Dell NetWorker cons

"For special situations, there are options within advanced settings. You don't have to dig too far for them, but they're not quite as straightforward."

"They are not cheap. They are more expensive than others."

"While Zerto's current version supports VMware environments, I'd like the added flexibility of using Hypervisors as well."

"The licensing is confusing and complicated."

"The setup of the system, although simple to get working, is a little more tricky to get right. This aspect could have benefitted from a bit more explanation."

"Certain areas were designed and work fine for VMware but are under development for Hyper-V. Eventually, all features will work for both platforms."

"The pricing could be a little bit lower."

"It has some quirks. We have quirks with appliances. Some things don't really work as expected, but it is minor."

More Zerto cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the license could be cheaper and it would be a benefit if they came up with a new pricing model. The competitors here in Oman sell universal licensing where a number of virtual machines are hosted at the customer place which can be licensed, or you can license the CPU sockets in those servers. However, NetWorker offers only CPU sockets or overall storage capacity to backup, but there is no universal licensing where you can provide a number of VMs. They should offer more options to stay competitive with other solutions, such as Veeam."

"It is excellent from the pricing point of view. It is free with Data Protection Suite. Similarly, when you purchase Avamar, Dell EMC NetWorker is free with one terabyte license capacity. Its price is very competitive."

"Dell NetWorker is an expensive solution. None of the backup products are cheap. The licensing model offered is usually a five-year one."

"You have to buy the deduplication software separately from the license."

"It is a relatively inexpensive product compared to one of its competitors."

"I have a capacity-based license, but I don't know the exact cost of that license."

"Low cost is key."

"Dell EMC NetWorker is very expensive."

More Dell NetWorker pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is good. It's affordable."

"It was a little bit expensive. It took a long time for us to get DR for our workstations. It's one thing when you have 15 servers, but when we needed to bring on almost another 200 users, and each was the same price as the servers, it was too expensive. But Zerto worked with us and gave us a solution that was pretty decent in terms of price."

"If it were easier to license, and to scale it out a little bit more economically, that'd be a godsend. At the end of the day, my druthers would be to have all 200 of our servers protected by this platform. But for a company our size, that stretches our IT budget and it just doesn't make economic sense."

"Zerto's price seems fair. It's competitive."

"Zerto is very cost-effective. We get really great value for the cost of the service."

"The pricing is based on virtual machines. They need to do better in regards to their tiering pricing rather than one price per VM. A lot of times we have VMs that are lower tier, such as Tier 2 or Tier 3, but we pay the same price as for Tier 1. I know they are developing this out, but it would be nice if they could provide a little better pricing in regards to their tiering protection."

"From a pricing standpoint, there is value in it without question. However, it can become quite expensive when you start looking at the number of workloads you have in the environment and what you would like to do."

"Having backup and DR is somewhat moderately important to us. The problem with us, and a lot of companies, is the issue with on-prem Zerto. It utilizes whatever you have for a SAN. Or, if you are like us, we have a vSAN and that storage is not cheap. So, it is cheaper to have a self-contained backup system that is on its own storage rather than utilizing your data center storage, like your vSAN. While it is somewhat important to have both backup and DR, it is not incredibly important to have both. I know Zero is trying to heavily dip their toes in the water of backup and recovery. Once you see what Zerto can do, I don't think anyone will not take Zerto because they don't necessarily specialize in backup and recovery 100 percent. They do replication so well."

More Zerto pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Backup and Recovery solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

842,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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

16%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What's the difference between Dell EMC Avamar and Dell EMC NetWorker?

From the very beginning, Dell EMC NetWorker considers users and those who might potentially become users. In terms of both pricing and setup, this product offers an experience that is significantly...

What do you like most about Dell NetWorker?

The feature that offers the greatest benefits in ensuring data integrity is its backup capability.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell NetWorker?

NetWorker has a high price compared to other solutions. Pricing is a major concern.

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.

Dell PowerProtect Data Manager vs Dell NetWorker

Comparisons

Compared 30% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Dell NetWorker

Compared 13% of the time

Dell Avamar vs Dell NetWorker

Compared 12% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Dell NetWorker

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs Dell NetWorker

Compared 7% of the time

More Dell NetWorker Competitors

Veeam Data Platform vs Zerto

Compared 16% of the time

VMware Live Recovery vs Zerto

Compared 14% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Zerto

Compared 10% of the time

Rubrik vs Zerto

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service vs Zerto

Compared 6% of the time

More Zerto Competitors

Product Reports

Dell NetWorker

Download Dell NetWorker product report

Download Zerto product report

Also Known As

NetWorker

Zerto Virtual Replication

Overview

Built on a reputation of efficiency and reliability, thousands of customers trust Dell NetWorker to protect their data and applications across multiple environments, from core to edge to cloud.

Inherently flexible, NetWorker helps you deploy and leverage the data protection that fits your needs. NetWorker protects both physical and virtual environments, including VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V, as well as cloud workloads on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

NetWorker is available as part of Dell Data Protection Suite, which offers comprehensive data protection software applications and tools. NetWorker is delivered as software and as a virtual edition.

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

Republic Bank, Westgate Resorts, Macquire Cloud Services, Shriners, Panatonni, Qatar Islamic Bank, Eurosport

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

Dell NetWorker vs. Zerto