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HPE Zerto Software vs Unitrends comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 11, 2025

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

HPE Zerto Software
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
2nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
340
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (2nd)
Unitrends
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
36th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of HPE Zerto Software is 3.1%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Unitrends is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Backup and Recovery
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user177801 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 23, 2023
 

Featured Reviews

Sachin Vinay - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Todd Guthrie - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution can be used to back up servers and Hyper-V cluster nodes, but its support is super expensive
I wouldn't rate Unitrends a ten out of ten because we had some hard drive failures in the appliance. Typically, when you have OneDrive, you can get it replaced. For some particular reason, the situation caused the entire system to crash. We had to reinstall the CentOS operating system on it, and we lost all our backups. They said there was no way to retain it, and it was pretty devastating and concerning that a drive failure would cause the loss of all the data on the appliance. It was extremely disappointing, and we had to start from scratch after three years worth of backup data. I rate Unitrends a nine out of ten for stability.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What I like most about Zerto is that it makes my job much easier. I have peace of mind knowing that it works. The replication time and the minor amount of time it takes to sync a new server outside of any of my huge 40-terabyte boxes is ridiculously quick."
"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."
"The real-time replication of data is the most valuable feature. It is a vast improvement in scheduled daily backups. Real-time data is streamed to the offsite data center, which allows us to restore our mission-critical applications up to 10 seconds from when the last changes were made in our system. If we enter a sales order or enter any kind of information in our ERP application it is replicated within 10 seconds to the offsite location."
"The ability to fully test your entire environment without actually performing a failover is invaluable."
"Zerto helped our organization meet compliance requirements by ensuring data protection and recovery strategies align with our regulatory standards."
"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."
"Zerto's most valuable features include its user-friendly interface, multi-tenancy capabilities, and near-zero downtime recovery."
"From a management perspective, one of the biggest benefits is to see the excitement of your engineers having a tool that truly enables them, really making their lives easier. That is something that I love. When we came out of the PoC, their eyes were just wide with excitement of what was possible now."
"I am impressed with the tool's reporting and UniView features."
"The most valuable feature of Unitrends for me is the automated feedback"
"When I have had to use tech support, they've been very good."
"When we talk about a backup point of view, from a backup perspective, it's a good one."
"The predictive analytics are great and the reporting is awesome."
"The ability to back up both physical and virtual appliances under one roof."
"Replication to Forever Cloud."
"They have great support."
 

Cons

"Better communication around pricing would be useful - particularly in light of the economic and tariff situation we have going on."
"The mission critical apps, like the ERP system or any casino software, are areas that I always hope to improve."
"The GUI could be streamlined a bit more to enhance the administrative tasks."
"Their data backup and restore have some ways to go."
"The backup functions are in need of improvement."
"While Zerto's current version supports VMware environments, I'd like the added flexibility of using Hypervisors as well."
"The onboarding was not very good. It felt like, "Now you have Zerto, good luck. Figure out how to use it.""
"Another area for improvement I'd like to see is the tuning of the VRAs built into the GUI. It's a little cryptic. You really have to be a very technical engineer to get that deep into it. I'd like to see a little better interface that allows you to do that tuning yourself, rather than trying to get their engineer and your engineer together to do it."
"Techs don't see to be well-versed in troubleshooting issues that arise and tickets stay opened for weeks for resolution."
"Support is great for small simple issues, but anything more difficult, it is hard to get good resolutions without having to badger them and their management."
"The solution's base operating system needs to be improved."
"Comparing the features and the working pattern, definitely they have to come down on pricing if they want to compete in the market."
"There's a lot that can be made better. For example, it could be more scalable."
"Probably the biggest issue I've had is actually paying for the unit, and part of that problem is that they use a third party for the billing."
"​​Follow up for the DRaaS service setup. I'm still waiting to schedule a DRaaS test after upgrading several months ago."
"The solution’s support and onboarding process needs to be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In a world where others are catching up, e.g., VMware High Availability, there needs to be a less expensive option as well. When a customer has approximately 100 VMs, if you multiply by 40, we aren't charging a very high margin on it at all since the license is so expensive. We feel their pain. That is the most expensive part of it. The storage, CPU, and RAM are a lot less. It is the licensing that is really expensive. Whereas, with an option like VMware High Availability, it is a couple dollars per month. That is our spend that we are charged by VMware, then our margin is higher on those VMs. Giving us some ability to have higher margins, as an MSP, would be a good thing."
"Zerto is a little expensive."
"Zerto is slightly expensive, but we do see the value in it."
"Zerto is not overly expensive. It's worth what we're getting for it, but with tough times, a discount would be beneficial."
"It is cost-efficient because we have perpetual licenses. We are a small to medium-sized business, so cost is a pretty big important factor."
"I wish it were cheaper, but I would purchase it again at the same price."
"It is less expensive than the full solution that we had previously, but at the same time, it's not an inexpensive product either."
"The pricing is very reasonable."
"With respect to cost, my advice is to get what you need."
"Unitrends is an expensive solution."
"When you purchase initially, get into the program which gives replacement hardware for free when you renew your support agreement."
"I would rate the solution's pricing a four out of ten. The licensing is yearly and it depends on the customers."
"When we renew the Unitrends maintenance contract and update it to the latest version, the cost would be $5,000 per year. There are no hidden costs. They've been transparent with the costs."
"The cost of Unitrends definitely draws you in. The licensing is all included in the appliance, which is a great incentive."
"Talk with the sales guys. They can work with you on the best package."
"Based on a scale of one to ten, with one being low and ten being high, I would rate the pricing of this solution as a three. Also, there are no additional costs involved in the standard licensing of the solution."
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Comparison Review

it_user159711 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Answers from the Community

it_user177801 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 20, 2016
Sep 20, 2016
We have recently implemented Zerto as a disaster recovery solution. Not only does it replicated, it allows you to created boot orders for the VM's. This means you can have your SQL server start and set an automatic delay for the applications servers. It can also be configured to bring a failover test up on an isolated network for DR testing. It can also replicate between different hypervisors. ...
2 out of 16 answers
it_user157908 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 5, 2015
Hello, Check the VBA module from networker legato software, it might be what you need. Kind Regards, John.
it_user136023 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 5, 2015
So does that mean you want to have a Disaster Recovery solution where data is not on site your bunker site? but yet allows for a fast recovery in case your primary site is down? - What virtualization solution do you use? - What is the link between the 2 (?) sites? - What RPO and RTO are you aiming for? - How much data do you need to recover?
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Computer Software Company
13%
Retailer
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Non Profit
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 ballpark Zerto's pricing at about $1,000 per VM, which I find fair for what it does, but the cost of entry was tough initially due to the minimum number needed to start. I really needed to prove ...
What do you like most about Unitrends?
The most valuable feature of Unitrends for me is the automated feedback
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Unitrends?
Unitrends is an expensive solution. We've negotiated deals where they've given us the $ 62,000 to $ 64,000 appliance for free but charged $ 90,000 for three years of support.
What needs improvement with Unitrends?
In terms of improvement, the UI, especially in the recovery section, is unclear about which repository it uses—I had to hover over to find that information. Figuring out the scripting part wasn't s...
 

Also Known As

Zerto Virtual Replication
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
NHL Players Association, Salvation Army, Sligro Food Group, Mason General Hospital, Tec Group, Saldab IT, Baker Tilly, Clinton Savings Bank, Ennit Magna Bank, Manukau Institute of Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Zerto Software vs. Unitrends and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.