CrashPlan vs. VMware Site Recovery Manager

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
CrashPlan
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
CrashPlan® provides secure, scalable, and straightforward endpoint data backup, to help organizations recover from any worst-case scenario, whether it is a disaster, simple human error, a stolen laptop, ransomware, or an as-of-yet-undiscovered calamity.
$2.99
per month
VMware SRM
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
VMware's Site Recovery Manager (VMware SRM) is a disaster recovery option, used to automate orchestration of failover and failback to minimize downtime and improve availability with VMware Site Recovery Manager.N/A
Pricing
CrashPlanVMware Site Recovery Manager
Editions & Modules
CrashPlan Essential
$2.99
per month
CrashPlan Professional
$88
per year
CrashPlan Enterprise
$108
per year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CrashPlanVMware SRM
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CrashPlanVMware Site Recovery Manager
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
CrashPlanVMware Site Recovery Manager
Small Businesses
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Score 9.6 out of 10
Axcient x360Cloud
Axcient x360Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.7 out of 10
NAKIVO Backup & Replication
NAKIVO Backup & Replication
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Bacula Enterprise
Bacula Enterprise
Score 9.7 out of 10
Veeam Backup for Azure
Veeam Backup for Azure
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CrashPlanVMware Site Recovery Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(83 ratings)
7.3
(7 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.9
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.8
(3 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
5.0
(8 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.7
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
CrashPlanVMware Site Recovery Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
CrashPlan
Individuals (SOHO), families and SMBs, who have a tight budget for offsite critical company data backup are well suited to this product. Especially if you want your data to be hosted locally (Australia in our case). Larger companies, with higher requirements and budgets would be better served elsewhere. Especially when you consider the poor technical support. Although, to be fair, their poor support may just be issues with their Pro/SMB products, as opposed to their enterprise products. However, if that is the case it's a pretty poor show/indicator still.
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VMware by Broadcom
It's quite well suited for a medium to large size VMWare virtualization infrastructure where your production infrastructure can be failed over to a disaster recovery site. There are other cheaper options for a smaller budget business. Also, for a non mission critical virtual infrastructure, you can simply use VM backups such as Veeam backups for restoring failed VMs
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Pros
CrashPlan
  • Code42 is the most affordable backup system offering unlimited storage that I could find. I came from SOS Online Backup, which I ultimately decided to drop after my monthly rate for their unlimited plan increased by 20x.
  • With Code42's unlimited storage option, I don't have to worry about the fact that my backups are significant in space. As a photographer with thousands of images at stake, I need to run large backups often.
  • Code42 runs continuously and silently in the background of my desktop computer. It is truly "set and go", so I don't have to think about it when I'm away. It runs until the designated drive has been fully backed up to my cloud storage. It will then automatically email me once the backup is complete (or, it will email me if it encounters any errors).
  • Customer service is above par. Anytime I need help, a chat agent is available (chat is my communication preference), they are always friendly, and go above and beyond to resolve my needs.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • Easy configuration and setup.
  • Testing of a particular VM or datastore with several VMs is easy.
  • Auto configuration of IPs makes the process even easier.
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Cons
CrashPlan
  • The CrashPlan program installed on your computer is Java-based vs. a native application. While this makes development for CrashPlan easier, there are a lot of drawbacks to Java programs including more resources usage, less stability, and overall more clunky interface.
  • While this was also in the Pros category - CrashPlan is an extremely powerful and flexible program, which adds a great deal of complexity. Setting up CrashPlan isn't always a simple procedure, and depending on the complexity of your backup set, can take a while to tinker around with the settings to get everything to work properly.
  • The CrashPlan desktop program consists of a Java program front end, as well as a backend service - there are times when the backend service will crash, and the front end Java program will refuse to load. Typically, restarting the service or restarting the computer will resolve the issue, but sometimes more in-depth troubleshooting is required.
  • Perhaps one of the biggest downsides to CrashPlan is its price - at $10/month/computer CrashPlan is more than double the price of some existing backup services such as Backblaze (priced at $50/year/computer). To add salt to the wound, about a year and a half ago, CrashPlan discontinued their consumer options - which were very reasonably priced at $60/year for a single computer or a family plan priced at $150/year for up to 10 computers. When these options were discontinued, the cost of backing up with CrashPlan was effectively doubled for the same feature set.
  • Along with the previous example, CrashPlan had the option to back up to a remote machine on a different network with a free Crashplan account. This option was eliminated when the consumer line of services were discontinued.
  • While the backup service provided by CrashPlan are still first in class, the above two controversial changes have broken some trust between CrashPlan and its clients.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • It’s unfortunate, but more and more, the quality of VMware’s products and the technical support teams behind them has degraded significantly. We have opened several support requests within the last few months and ended up resolving a large majority ourselves due to the poor performance of their remote teams.
  • VMware is suffering from the same illness that’s affecting multiple U.S. technology firms, in that their focus has shifted completely away from their customers and moved to pleasing investors. In doing so, clients suffer because they do not get properly tested products and the support teams behind them are very weak and overwhelmed.
  • We worked close to a month trying to get SRM V6.5 to work. We have worked with many previous versions of SRM in the past while using HP EVAs, NetApps and Hitachi arrays, and we can honestly say that we are greatly disappointed with this release and the company.
  • We escalated right up to engineering, but their response times were brutally slow; the technicians were juniors at best.
  • As a technology leader, the last thing you want during a DR is to be dealing with a company that just can't deliver. SRM is not cheap, and you would expect much better products and support from VMware.
  • If you are comparing products, try other companies like Veeam... We ended up using them instead, the setup and execution was easy and seamless, and they answered all our questions quickly and efficiently. They actually do care about their clients.
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Likelihood to Renew
CrashPlan
No other product works as well.
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VMware by Broadcom
- easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster
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Usability
CrashPlan
Overall, it is simple to use, lightweight, and effective.
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VMware by Broadcom
VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.
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Support Rating
CrashPlan
Friendly and knowledgeable support team available to assist with this product. Code 42 (formerly CrashPlan) offers unlimited storage options for reasonable costs, so you really can't go wrong with this product. They have been a reliable resource for our company, and I would recommend to others looking for an easy setup with unlimited storage.
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VMware by Broadcom
Sometimes we have to struggle explaining the problem and getting it resolved on priority. The overall quality of support team is not as good as it used to be in past.
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Implementation Rating
CrashPlan
Very easy to follow the install guide.
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
CrashPlan
Unitrends is our primary backup solution here at my place of employment, and I have no complaints. It does on-prem backups to a storage pool and with that, we chose not to also use Unitrends could storage as the cost was pretty high. Crashplan has a low cost and we were familiar with it. We found a great fit for Crashplan at a remote office with a web server, file share server, and a Domain Controller in addition to the Unitrends solution there. I also set up CrashPlan for a nonprofit org, as well as a Health foods store. I felt like I could stand behind the CrashPlan solution with my experience with it, in places like these where every dollar mattered.
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VMware by Broadcom
Entertained Veeam, however with SRM's tight integration and "brand" it was an easy decision. The cost for a 25 server license also weighed in the decision for using a VMware product. Plus I am a VMware fan and feel this option to go with SRM will transcend jobs.
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Return on Investment
CrashPlan
  • Tremendous cost savings as the amount of data you backup doesn't impact cost. One flat rate!
  • Implementation time was minimal and requires little to no maintenance. Since installation, I've not had to correct or fix any issues. It just works.
  • We opted to supplement Code42 with another solution that allowed us to backup data to a local repository due to the amount for data that changes in our firm.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • The biggest positive is that we have a data recovery solution that we can test and verify in a live condition. Prior to this we were only hoping we could recover from a disaster.
  • We've been only running for 4 months and haven't had to use SRM.
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