N-able Cove Data Protection vs Zerto comparison

N-able Cove Data Protection

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2024

Zerto and N-able Cove Data Protection are robust solutions for data backup and disaster recovery. N-able Cove has a slight edge due to its comprehensive feature set and integration.

Features: Zerto offers real-time replication, rapid recovery options, and minimal downtime in disaster scenarios. N-able Cove includes backup, archiving, disaster recovery under one platform, and a broader feature set, giving it an advantage in versatility.

Room for Improvement: Zerto could benefit from enhanced reporting features, better integration with additional cloud services, and improved UI intuitiveness. N-able Cove users seek improvements in performance speed, bug fixes, and a more streamlined user experience. N-able Cove's need for performance optimization is more frequently noted.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zerto is praised for its straightforward setup process and responsive customer support. N-able Cove's deployment process is flexible across various environments but can be complex at times. Both products receive positive feedback for customer service, with N-able Cove's deployment flexibility being advantageous.

Pricing and ROI: Zerto is highlighted for its competitive pricing relative to its advanced features, providing good ROI. N-able Cove, viewed as more expensive, is valued for its comprehensive feature set, justifying the cost. N-able Cove's higher perceived cost is balanced by its extensive capabilities, providing satisfying ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed N-able Cove Data Protection vs. Zerto Report (Updated: December 2024).

N-able Cove Data Protection vs. Zerto

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Categories and Ranking

N-able Cove Data Protection

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

25th

Ranking in Cloud Backup

16th

Average Rating

9.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

SaaS Backup (8th), MSP Backup (2nd)

Zerto

Ranking in Backup and Recovery

2nd

Ranking in Cloud Backup

3rd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

279

Ranking in other categories

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

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of N-able Cove Data Protection is 1.2%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zerto is 2.8%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Backup and Recovery

Featured Reviews

Jack Henson

Owner at Henson Business Products

Allows us to back up workstations and servers, and saved us time when checking endpoints and the viability of backups

I have some issues with the agent failing on workstations. I've had to completely uninstall several of them, delete everything, and start over to get them to work. That's been the biggest source of my problems recently. The problem is that when we delete one, we lose the backup. Consequently, it means we're without a backup unless we have a local copy. When we delete the agent, there's the problem of how to go back and restore it. I haven't had to deal with it yet, because I haven't had a failure that occurred while I was doing that. I had a workstation that started failing, and we couldn't get the services to run. I don't know what caused it. I had to reinstall the agent, which didn't work. I had to go into the machine and delete everything and load another agent onto it. Once I did that, I was able to make it work, but 90% of the time I never have an issue. During the other 10% of the time when I have a problem, it's a mess. The ability to recover to a different workstation or a different data point is a little bit clumsy. It could use some work.

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Derrick Brockel

Senior Manager of Operations at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Good GUI, easy setup, and fast recovery

When we tested it, it had more functions than what we used it for, but it was a very good BCDR product. We liked the reliability and availability. Zerto enables you to do disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud, but we did not use that feature. We used Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. It was strong in that aspect. I would rate it an eight out of ten there. Zerto's speed of recovery was comparable. There was no synchronous and asynchronous replication. If I had to give it a number, it would be a seven out of ten. It was the same as others. There was not much difference. It was easy to migrate data. There was some initial configuration in syncing, but it was easy. I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of the ease of migration. Zerto’s ability to keep our users collaborating with one another during a data migration was good. I would rate it a seven out of ten in this aspect as well as in terms of its impact on RTOs. Zerto helps reduce downtime in any situation. We can bring up a database in minutes. It probably takes five minutes for the final sync. The cost of downtime depends on the database. It may be 50,000 if you have call center people sitting around. Normally, most of our small outages like that ranged in the tens of thousands. Zerto did save time in a data recovery situation. We did not have ransomware, but there were times we had database corruption where the users would corrupt the database, and the database would not start. It would do snapshotting. It was not necessarily ransomware, but it was testing upgrades or Oracle upgrades. The data recovery happened within five minutes, if not sooner. A normal restore would probably be four to eight hours if we had to restore from a tape and apply logs. Zerto helps to reduce an organization's DR testing. You can spin off an extra database pretty quickly and have users test against the third or fourth copy. It saves one to three days of testing depending on test cycles. You could do sequential testing. I would probably measure it more in days than hours. All of that time can be used by a DBA to do something else. Zerto reduces the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. One person could probably orchestrate it now versus one to three people. It did not reduce the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management because we are pretty thin. We would not have gotten rid of anybody.

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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

"It's extremely important that Cove provides cloud-based data protection with backup, disaster recovery, and archiving. That is a necessity for my insurance. As an IT company, my insurance would cost more if my backups were not offsite and off-network."

"What I like the most about it's the ease of use and the reliability that it has when copying information to the cloud."

"N-able Cove Data Protection is user-friendly and straightforward, and the dashboard is clear."

"The most valuable feature by far is the Virtual Disaster Recovery. On top of that is the bare-metal recovery. The recovery options that we have are great. We have tested the Virtual Disaster Recovery and the bare-metal recovery in just about any scenario you can think of. We have even restored bare metal, a full server, to a laptop, and had full functionality. It's just insane how well it works and how simple it is. It does most of the work for you."

"The most valuable aspect is the added protection of having a cloud-based backup service. It provides redundancy in case of data loss."

"One of the bigger features and advantages of the solution is that it is easy to integrate with my RMM which is also N-able."

"It's their cloud, it's their storage. I don't have to buy a space on Amazon or Google's cloud and then use their software to push it. That works well for me. This way, I don't have to worry about another option or the opportunity that there might be a credential leak."

"The user interface is the most valuable. It gives us the ability to check everything. With more than 100 endpoints running that software, I like the ability to quickly check that everything is working correctly. That's one of the biggest selling points."

More N-able Cove Data Protection pros

"We selected Zerto because the RPO is extremely low, so you can get that server back up almost immediately. That was a huge thing. Also, the ability to do failover tests, where you can test your environment, but not have it impact your production environment, was huge."

"The live failover tests and point-in-time recovery options have been exceptionally valuable features of Zerto for our organization."

"There are two main things that I like. One is the fact that my recovery time is now much lower effectively. It is also very valuable that I can test it. There is a possibility to test that failover."

"I've used backup solutions like Veeam in the past, but Zerto seemed like a better, faster solution. We adopted Zerto because of the speed, and because we wanted to do everything in-house."

"Zerto is fast to restore our mission-critical servers when needed."

"It works really well. It's simple to set up and works well. Moreover, disaster recovery to the cloud to our organization is very important. We actually had to use it three years ago, and it worked out well for us."

"The ease of use is one of the best features. Previously, we were using Site Replication Manager with VMware and it was a little bit cumbersome. With Zerto, we liked the fact that it was hardware-agnostic and we were able to spin it up pretty quickly and get it working."

"The quickness and efficiency of creating snapshots, on a real-time basis, is one of the most valuable features. Whenever changes are made on a server, Zerto starts taking snapshots right away and replicating them to the DR site. It's very effective and very quick."

More Zerto pros

Cons

"Having the licensing available for partners to be able to take advantage of testing without paying would make a big difference."

"N-able Cove Data Protection for Microsoft 365 is an area with shortcomings that need improvement."

"The only area that needs improvement is that it is a little bit difficult when you get into virtual machines. The initial deployment of Cove is a little tedious, not for standard machines, but when you get into specialty stuff, like Hyper-V."

"One area I don't like has to do with the agent that goes on the system... if a system stays offline for some length of time, say for a week or so, I may have to go back in and reinstall the agent to get it back in business. I don't know what's causing that."

"I have some issues with the agent failing on workstations. I've had to completely uninstall several of them, delete everything, and start over to get them to work."

"For the MSP side, they could have more of a "security user" that can go in and only see certain clients. If you give somebody access as a technician, they can see all the clients."

"We don't use the solution’s automated recovery testing because SolarWinds made me cross. When they released it, I went, "Oh, well, that's quite good." Because if you use the system, then it supposedly spins up, and on the portal, it gives you a screenshot of the booted device. So, I phoned up, and I said, "Oh, that's really quite cool. How much is that?" They said, "No, no, no. It's all included in your license." I went, "Okay then," and went and deployed it on about half the fleet. One of the options that our customers have is they can pay us a small amount every month for us to test the recovery just to prove that it's viable, and I thought, "Well, this will do that for us. Nice." Then, in the next invoice, we got a charge for it. While It was not a huge amount, I took offense at the fact that we were told that it would be a no extra cost option that was part of our license, but it turns out that it's chargeable. Therefore, we haven't used it since."

"For small amounts of data, recovery is easy, but when it's large amounts of data, it takes forever. So, if they can have a service where they put our data on a hard drive and ship it to us as fast as possible, it would be great. Even if there's a fee associated with it, it's fine."

More N-able Cove Data Protection cons

"The backup end of this solution could be improved. We tried using it as a full backup solution and it took way too long to complete at least one backup."

"When it comes to a solution, one of the things the management wants is to standardize platforms. That's why when Rubrik came out with their solution, they wanted to look at it. For instance, if you have multiple technologies, you're going to need admins to manage all those different ones. I would like Zerto to be something that fits all our needs, including the backup that Rubrik provides, but I understand that not all solutions can be that way."

"An integrated encryption would allow for faster initial install and connection to the remote cloud site."

"They definitely have room for improvement in a couple of areas. One is role-based access control. Right now, they don't have an identity source so they use the identity of the vCenter or the VMM. If they connected to an identity source like Active Directory and allowed for granular roles and permissions, that would be an improvement."

"Overall, Zerto is doing a very good job. We have experienced a few downtimes on networking. Most of the time, they come up with a solution immediately to sort out any challenge that may affect data flow or data migration. It does not happen frequently. We might experience it once in two months, but when we face any downtime, it does not impact the data."

"The alerting doesn't quite give you the information about what exactly is going on when an issue comes up. We do get alerts inside of our vCenter, but it doesn't quite give you accurate information inside the plugin to be able to tell us what's going on without having to go into the actual Zerto application and figuring out what's causing the issue."

"The only complaint is that if I remove a host from a cluster, it does not like that. If I move and put the host in maintenance mode to fix it, and vRA is down, Zerto does not like it. Zerto should figure out that this host has an issue and it went down. Zerto should then let me upload that vRA information to another vRA."

"From the relationship standpoint, we have never had a local rep in South Bend, Indiana. It has always been somebody in Boston, and there is not a lot of communication. That is one of the big things. We would like help driving the business and talking to our sales people as well as more involvement from them. We could really utilize it more, drawing more customers in, but we need help with that."

More Zerto cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"N-able Cove Data Protection is an averagely-priced product."

"The price isn't extreme, but I'd love to pay less."

"The pricing of SolarWinds seems to be fair compared to the rest of the industry."

"There is no per node cost, at least not the way I am doing it. I am on bulk. New customers can be set up on a trial, where they can get things all squared away, then they can switch over to being a billed customer."

"The pricing, for now, is good. The package that they gave us recently is pretty good. It depends on how many clients you have, and you pay for certain terabytes per license. These terabytes, if not used, are pooled together."

"Cove only takes the data you have on the physical server. I can back that up for long periods of time, and I don't accrue high charges to have the data in the cloud. It stays at one rate. This allows me to forecast payment for the next one or two years and show clients their estimated growth."

"The cost is around ten dollars per workstation a month and that includes a certain amount of data."

"When you have a device/appliance on the site quite a lot of the other enterprise class backup people insist that you have their appliance, which is frankly offensively expensive. Because when you pry the top off, it's just a standard 19-inch tin box with a standard Intel I5 in it, some RAM, and a hard drive. Then, you go, "Why have they just charged me 5,500 quid for a box, which I could have probably build for under 500." Whereas, with the SolarWinds product, they don't have that. The backup appliances that we have onsite are just plain cooking PCs. We can build our own machines, which is reflected in the price that we can offer a customer."

More N-able Cove Data Protection pricing and cost advice

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

"We're getting our money's worth with Zerto."

"Pricing is one area where there could be some improvement. We would like to see a consumption model that would charge in a DR scenario, where you're failing over and consuming those resources, instead of a per-protected-node model. Or it could be a model based on the amount of storage space you're protecting."

"While we find the twenty-five VM license somewhat inflexible, the actual setup costs are minimal as the product is so easy to install."

"I have heard that it is expensive, but that is not my world."

"Obviously, I wish it were cheaper and more affordable. But I get what I pay for, so I can't complain."

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

"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."

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

21%

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

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 N-able Backup?

The initial setup of N-able Cove Data Protection was very easy.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for N-able Backup?

The pricing is affordable. N-able Cove Data Protection has a direct-to-cloud architecture, but it also allows saving backups locally without extra storage costs.

What needs improvement with N-able Backup?

There aren’t any challenges. Regarding the additional features, Cove is limited to disaster recovery with Azure. It would be great to make disaster recovery compatible with AWS.

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?

I would rate the pricing, setup cost, and licensing around a seven on a scale of one to ten. The pricing model could be more flexible to accommodate startup companies with lower budgets.

Veeam Data Platform vs N-able Cove Data Protection

Comparisons

Compared 16% of the time

Acronis Cyber Protect vs N-able Cove Data Protection

Compared 16% of the time

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 vs N-able Cove Data Protection

Compared 10% of the time

Azure Backup vs N-able Cove Data Protection

Compared 7% of the time

Rubrik vs N-able Cove Data Protection

Compared 5% of the time

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VMware Live Recovery vs Zerto

Compared 17% of the time

Veeam Data Platform vs Zerto

Compared 17% of the time

Rubrik vs Zerto

Compared 8% of the time

Commvault Cloud vs Zerto

Compared 8% of the time

Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service vs Zerto

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

N-able Cove Data Protection

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Also Known As

N-able Backup, SolarWinds Backup, SolarWinds MSP Backup & Recovery, SolarWinds MSP Backup

Zerto Virtual Replication

Learn More

N-able

Overview

Cove Data Protection, from N-able, is a comprehensive solution designed to safeguard critical business data. It offers a range of features including backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and endpoint protection. With automated backups and flexible scheduling options, it ensures data is protected and easily recoverable.

The solution also includes advanced security measures such as encryption and ransomware detection to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches. Cove Data Protection provides seamless integration with various platforms and offers centralized management for efficient monitoring and control.

With its user-friendly interface and robust capabilities, Cove Data Protection is an ideal choice for businesses seeking reliable data protection.

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

Computer Depot, Leading Edge Computers, IT Logic Australia

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

N-able Cove Data Protection vs. Zerto