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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
341
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (2nd), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (1st)
Unitrends
Ranking in Backup and Recovery
31st
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 September 2025, in the Backup and Recovery category, the mindshare of HPE Zerto Software is 2.6%, down from 2.7% 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 Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
HPE Zerto Software2.6%
Unitrends0.5%
Other96.9%
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

"Most of the time, this is at least a two person job. We used to have three people doing it. Previously, when we had a disaster recovery drill, the way it worked was 12 of us would show up in the office on a Friday night and work overnight from 12:00 AM on Friday night to 8:00 AM in the morning on Saturday. Then, three of us would be working for four hours out of those eight or nine hours just getting applications up and running in Arizona. Now, for the disaster recovery drill, I just stay onsite to help and assist anybody else as they need during that time frame and my work is done in about a 30-minute time frame. This is compared to the four or five hours it used to take for the three of us to do it."
"It's very stable. It doesn't require a lot of intervention."
"The near-synchronous replication is key. That has allowed us to provide the low RPOs that we promise. For key systems, that has been the deciding factor."
"It helps us keep our required retention period for specific documents and allows us to recover older documents if we have to compare and recreate those."
"t's reduced our disaster recovery testing by 50%."
"The most valuable feature is Zerto's ability to precopy data to a remote destination prior to the actual live migration period. That saves us a lot of time and has been very helpful. For example, if we had migrations occurring in waves over a period of several weeks with a VPG or VPG setup of approximately 50 VMs, that is multiple gigabytes of data, even terabytes in many cases. Having that data already copied on the evening of the migration saves considerable hours of time. It easily saves us four to six hours a night."
"It's also very much faster than any other migration or disaster recovery platform we have. I work with virtualization, mostly on VMware, and I must admit that Zerto is even better than VMware Site Recovery Manager. Zerto compresses the data and it works much faster."
"The most valuable features are the continuous streaming, that it takes very little CPU usage — it doesn't affect production — and the recovery time is very short."
"It is very easy to set up and get started. Almost too easy. We racked this device and had it up and running in less than 15 minutes."
"It's not easy to scale it."
"I like the fact that you can recover the VMs inside the appliance. For example, they're basically running this appliance on a Linux-based distribution, and they're spinning off KVM virtual machines inside."
"Replication to Forever Cloud."
"Backup/archive to multiple locations."
"The backup feature and recovery option are good because they allow the instant recovery of Hyper-V nodes and files."
"The ability to backup both physical and virtual machines, along with having an appliance store the backups locally instead of on a file server, NAS, or SAN."
"VM backup is much faster and more reliable, as I can test my backups with Data Copy Access jobs."
 

Cons

"The ease of use of the restoration utility could be challenging initially."
"More user support would be best for me because I'm not in the product all the time. So, having strong support is probably the most important decision on any products that we buy."
"Zerto could add text alerts if there are critical problems and alerts if changes affect our replication."
"The ease of setup can be improved in the next release of HPE Zerto Software."
"The native Zerto implementation requires quite a big environment. My environment is rather small. I do not have hundreds of virtual machines."
"I would like to have an overall orchestration capability that would enable you to do multiple VPGs in some sort of order, with delays in between."
"The main concern involves the Delta Sync that triggers when changing the recovery direction. For large virtual machines of several terabytes, this process can take considerable time."
"We had a situation where we had to relicense VMs once they were moved over. We later found out that that feature is built-in, but it's not easy to find. The way it's done is that you have to go to the target site to turn it on. If that were explained a little bit better up front, that would be helpful."
"If the interface could be less complex, it is would be great."
"Comparing the features and the working pattern, definitely they have to come down on pricing if they want to compete in the market."
"No appliance update notifications."
"I would like to see the real-time replication process improved, and a zero RPO feature added."
"There's a lot that can be made better. For example, it could be more scalable."
"It seems like Unitrends moved away from enterprise customer engagement and moved more towards the managed service provider market."
"The solution’s support and onboarding process needs to be improved."
"Network-based storage stability could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price-wise, Zerto is fairly reasonable and I can't complain about it when we compare it against Oracle and SAP licensing."
"Zerto is very cost-effective. We get really great value for the cost of the service."
"We have seen ROI. Several times, we needed to recover, and we were able to go to Zerto."
"It is not cheap, but it is reasonable for what it is offering. It gives me the peace of mind that my data is protected. It is worth the cost."
"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."
"We believe the pricing, setup costs, and licensing are easy to understand. The pricing seems very reasonable."
"The product's pricing is the one area where it is less competitive."
"Zerto is like a Ferrari. It's very fast but not the cheapest solution. You're paying a high price for quality and the assurance that you will have the environment up and steady."
"When you purchase initially, get into the program which gives replacement hardware for free when you renew your support agreement."
"No comment."
"Their licensing depended on the number of CPUs you had."
"You should be aware how much the monthly costs are to use, what the initial costs for hardware are, and what the options to expand are, if needed."
"Initial pricing is competitive. Renewal pricing is steep, so make sure to project costs for the lifetime of the appliance(s)."
"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."
"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."
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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
7%
Retailer
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Educational Organization
10%
Non Profit
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business91
Midsize Enterprise85
Large Enterprise193
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise8
 

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?
Regarding my experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing, I think on the pricing side, I don't generally deal with it, but from what I hear from my finance team, it's somewhat on the higher...
What do you like most about Unitrends?
The most valuable feature of Unitrends for me is the automated feedback
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...
What is your primary use case for Unitrends?
I use Unitrends to back up my VMware virtual machines and files, ensuring redundancy for both disks and protection against ransomware. I have implemented an air gap strategy by keeping some backups...
 

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: September 2025.
867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.