IBM Spectrum Protect vs Zerto comparison

Read 298 Zerto reviews

9,448 Views
4,596 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

IBM Spectrum Protect

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

IBM Spectrum Protect and Zerto are leading data protection solutions. While IBM Spectrum Protect offers robust features for large-scale data environments, Zerto's superior data recovery capabilities make it a preferred choice for rapid failover solutions.

Features: IBM Spectrum Protect provides scalability, comprehensive data management, and robust support for vast data environments. Zerto offers simplicity, seamless cloud platform integration, and effective disaster recovery. Both solutions have distinct strengths in their respective features.

Room for Improvement: Users suggest IBM Spectrum Protect could benefit from a more straightforward configuration process, a more intuitive design, and enhanced usability. Zerto users seek expanded data protection options, better reporting tools, and improvements in data protection breadth.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Spectrum Protect's deployment is complex and resource-intensive, though customer service is highly rated. Zerto is praised for quick and easy deployment, though customer service receives mixed reviews.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Spectrum Protect involves significant initial setup costs but offers substantial ROI for large enterprises with extensive data protection needs. Zerto also requires a notable investment but is considered worth the cost due to effective disaster recovery, offering compelling ROI with timely recovery options.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Zerto Report (Updated: March 2025).

IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Zerto

Download the complete report

Helped 842,296 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

IBM Spectrum Protect

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

149

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 IBM Spectrum Protect is 2.2%, down from 2.4% 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

Syed Habib

Head of Infrastructure Security (S.A.V.P) at EXIM Bank Ltd

Manageable and comprehensive and integrates robust backup features for core banking

It's adequate for my core banking, however, I am looking for another solution for all systems. It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum. This is why I am searching for another solution. The product also lacks any centralized graphical user interface (GUI), such as Jarek Pod, and I am limited to using a console-based text user interface, which my local partner handles completely.

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

"Once setup, you do not need to touch it again. You just need to do a formal check on possibly batch updates."

"The solution can back up every kind of workload in the environment."

"Disk-based implementation of a data protection solution for multiple sites is a better fit for my complex data protection needs."

"The archiving feature is the most valuable aspect of the solution."

"The most valuable features of Spectrum Protect would be the compression and the deduplication."

"The ability to do dedupe in the product is nice to have."

"Traditional archiving. One of our revenue streams involves maintaining archives of our customers' data for very long periods of time."

"Nothing beats this solution for file backup."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pros

"The granularity enables us to failover specific workloads instead of an all-or-nothing type of scenario, where you have to move your entire IP block and your data center, or you have to move large chunks of VMs. Those situations also make it prohibitive to test effectively."

"We implemented Zerto because it is crucial for our organization, especially as we move into the cloud. We needed to ensure that we could retrieve data properly and migrate easily. The solution allows us to keep our users collaborating throughout the migration process, making it much quicker than our previous solution."

"It protect and provide DR."

"Zerto's near-synchronous replication is extremely important to our organization."

"The most valuable feature is how simple it is to implement and how quickly you can get up and running at the second site. The solution is also extremely easy to use, for example, You just log onto the console and you can do a test failover with a few clicks."

"The continuation to the public cloud has been especially helpful where I can pretty much work with things like hosts and clusters as part of the data center."

"The feature I've found most valuable so far has been the ability to migrate the VMs from Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor. It's made our migration seamless. In the beginning, we were looking at freeware tools, and it was just a massive headache. Zerto solved a lot of the roadblocks that we'd run into in the past."

"Zerto's ability to test failovers with a record of how long it takes to fail the motor is beneficial, as it allows us to know the timing in the event we have to do it live."

More Zerto pros

Cons

"The version that we had when I first started made it look really bad. We are talking about commands that should have run in two seconds, but instead took four to eight hours. Other components were sluggish."

"It is not compatible with other operating systems like Windows or Linux, and lacks a consolidated dashboard from Browser Spectrum."

"There have been scalability issues. The core product does not support scale out. We needed to create a new system and manage resources separate from the existing one."

"The solution needs to work on disaster recovery integration. Basically, VMware applications to the cloud, for example. There needs to be integration with the storage, and integration with VMware."

"The administration tools for GI need improvement, as the current assessment suggests shortcomings in the back-end system."

"The features should be a little bit closer together."

"I would like to see monitoring within the platform: monitoring for storage pools and monitoring for the server's health (e.g., CPU and memory)."

"Most customers still struggle with the reporting piece, especially generating reports. I think it needs some improvements in this area."

More IBM Spectrum Protect cons

"They just came out with improvements for ransomware protection last week. I haven't used them yet but, overall, security and preventing ransomware is really a hot topic these days. I would like to see it detect when the ransomware occurs and provide more information on it."

"The technical support has room for improvement."

"The recovery processes of large datasets in the Cloud have room for improvement."

"I am a little bit worried about how Zerto will work with large volumes of data, such as replication for big data and very large files."

"They could iron out the licensing aspect of it, so we might be a bit quicker when implementing and starting to use it."

"In general, the solution is pretty good, but because it is geared toward simplicity, sometimes, when things go wrong, the answer is not very detailed so that things can be solved quickly. If things do go wrong, it does require a little bit deeper troubleshooting to resolve the issues. That's the only area where improvement could occur. There should be a little bit more details about if things go wrong, how to remedy them."

"I had to have my colleague contact technical support because we had an issue where VMs in VMware were getting blocked, and we weren't able to delete them."

"I want to have an OVF or some local deployment where I can deploy the ZVRA rather than having to push it from the console. Some of our smaller remote sites have relatively poor bandwidth, and they can't keep up with the constant deployment stream from our center console, meaning we have to find some creative hours to get around the bandwidth bottlenecks. If I could push out a small install file, install it locally, and then reach back to the console, that would be excellent."

More Zerto cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its licensing is complex, and its price is not really reasonable. It is on the expensive side. IBM, in general, is slightly expensive, but with IBM Spectrum for the virtual environment, they are looking into the aspect of helping customers with the cost and providing a cost-effective solution."

"We worked our licensing into a capacity model, which is nice. Now, everything is much simpler to manage from a licensing perspective."

"The solution has a capacity based licensing, front and back-end license."

"Regarding retro-compatibility of the product between versions, your data is always available and the ROI is unquestionable."

"We have spec'd out our build, and the cost of it can work quite easily today for our future needs."

"The product is not cheap."

"That's no longer my department, but I have some past experience with licensing. It is not cheap. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of licensing. In terms of additional costs, there is management overhead. It is a complex solution and a lot of work goes into managing clients. It has gotten better over the years, but compared to its competitor, it is still heavy on management overhead."

"It can be perceived as expensive since it is designed for enterprise use."

More IBM Spectrum Protect pricing and cost advice

"Zerto’s licensing model has changed a bit over the last year and they are in alignment with others. It is pretty simple and more economical."

"My understanding is that it's expensive but worth the price."

"The pricing is straightforward."

"If you are an IT person and you think that DR is too expensive then the cloud option from Zerto is good because anyone can afford to use it, as far as getting one or two of their criticals protected."

"It is an enterprise-grade product. When you buy enterprise-grade tools, you have to expect to pay a higher price. It goes back to the idea of you get what you pay for."

"When they changed their licensing model, pricing might have gotten a little more expensive for some use cases, but it has been pretty straightforward."

"It is not a bad pricing model."

"Pricing depends on your future growth. Start small and then scale up."

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

842,296 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

13%

Government

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 IBM Spectrum Protect?

IBM Spectrum Protect is stable.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Spectrum Protect?

It's expensive. I acknowledge the cost associated with it.

What needs improvement with IBM Spectrum Protect?

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.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Comparisons

Compared 19% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 18% of the time

Dell PowerProtect DD (Data Domain) vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 11% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 10% of the time

Rubrik vs IBM Spectrum Protect

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM Spectrum Protect 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

IBM Spectrum Protect

Download IBM Spectrum Protect product report

Download Zerto product report

Also Known As

IBM TSM, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager

Zerto Virtual Replication

Overview

IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) is a data protection platform that gives enterprises a single point of control and administration for backup and recovery. It is the flagship product in the IBM Spectrum Protect (Tivoli Storage Manager) family. It enables reliable, cost effective backups and fast recovery for virtual, physical and cloud environments of all sizes.

IBM

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

CERN, Einstein Healthcare, Nyherji, Allianz Australia, TZM, ABT Online, NCT, Kindred Healthcare Inc., Cobalt Iron, TransGrid, Baptist Health of Northeast Florida, Cash America, Piedmont Healthcare, RWGV, Arkansas Tech University, British Columbia Institute of Technology

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

IBM Spectrum Protect vs. Zerto