Best Backup Software in 2026

Veeam Data Platform is the commercial suite built around Veeam Backup & Replication, which is also available as a free Community Edition. The company dates its history to 2006 and states that it employs more than 7,000 people. It describes itself as the global leader in data resilience by market share and reports more than 550,000 customers, including 82% of the Fortune 500. In December 2025 Veeam completed the US$1.725 billion acquisition of Securiti AI, a data security posture management vendor, and its chief executive, Anand Eswaran, positioned the combined business as a data resilience, security and governance platform.

The platform is sold in Foundation, Advanced and Premium editions; Advanced adds monitoring, analytics and threat insights, and Premium adds orchestrated recovery. Veeam lists protection for virtual, physical, cloud, application and unstructured data, including Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Salesforce, Kubernetes and the three major public clouds, and claims support for more than 95% of hypervisors on the market. A Community Edition is free for up to 10 workloads and includes replication and granular restores, but no technical support. The main limitations are that commercial prices are not published and that the breadth of add-ons makes edition comparisons difficult from the vendor's own matrix.

Commvault is a US-listed (NASDAQ: CVLT) data protection company whose results releases carry a Tinton Falls, New Jersey dateline. For the fiscal year ended 31 March 2026 it reported total revenue of US$1,183.7 million, up 19%, and total annual recurring revenue of US$1,121.6 million, of which SaaS ARR was US$400.2 million. The company describes itself as a leader in unified resilience at enterprise scale and is led by president and chief executive Sanjay Mirchandani.

The product line is now organised as six recovery offerings: Cyber Recover for isolated recovery, Cloud Recover, Core Recover for complex on-premises infrastructure, SaaS Recover, ID Recover for Active Directory, Entra ID and Okta, and Agent Recover for reversing harmful actions by AI agents. Platform capabilities include Cleanroom Recovery, Air Gap Protect and threat scanning, delivered as software, SaaS or appliance. During fiscal 2026 Commvault acquired Satori to extend coverage to structured and AI data, and announced integrations with Microsoft Security and CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM and an alliance with NetApp. Commvault states that more than 100,000 organisations use its products. Pricing is not published, and the breadth of the portfolio means smaller customers may pay for capabilities they do not use.

Rubrik (NYSE: RBRK), headed by co-founder, chairman and chief executive Bipul Sinha, describes itself as "the Security and AI Operations Company". Its core product, Rubrik Security Cloud, secures, monitors and recovers data, identities and workloads across clouds. For the fiscal year ended 31 January 2026 Rubrik reported total revenue of US$1.32 billion, up 48%, and subscription ARR of US$1.46 billion, with 2,805 customers paying US$100,000 or more in subscription ARR. Its investor site later reported subscription ARR of US$1.66 billion and 3,084 such customers as of 31 July 2026.

Rubrik's products launched during fiscal 2026 show where the platform is heading: Rubrik Security Cloud Sovereign for customers that must control data location, Intelligent Business Recovery for Microsoft 365, DevOps Protection for Azure DevOps and GitHub, and Rubrik Agent Cloud for monitoring and undoing actions by AI agents. The company's emphasis on security operations means it is usually evaluated alongside security tools as well as backup products. Limitations: the vendor's website blocked automated access during research for this article, prices are not published, and the platform is aimed at enterprise buyers rather than small offices.

Cohesity became one of the largest data protection software vendors when it completed its combination with the enterprise data protection business of Veritas on 10 December 2024. At completion the company said it served more than 12,000 customers, including more than 85 of the Fortune 100 and nearly 70% of the Global 500. The deal brought Veritas NetBackup, NetBackup appliances and the Veritas Alta data protection offerings into Cohesity, which said it would continue to invest in products from both companies; Sanjay Poonen remained president and chief executive.

In practice the portfolio now has two lineages, Cohesity's own data protection platform and Veritas NetBackup with its appliances. Customers on either product can stay on it, which gives the combined company an unusually large installed base but also means two product architectures to maintain. Cohesity's website blocked automated access during research for this article, so feature and pricing details could not be verified from vendor pages and are omitted here. Cohesity is privately held, so it does not publish audited financial statements.

Acronis is a Swiss company, founded in Singapore and headquartered in Schaffhausen, that reports more than 750,000 business customers and more than 21,000 service providers in over 150 countries. Its business product, Acronis Cyber Protect, combines full-image and file-level backup with security functions in one product, an approach that distinguishes it from backup-only tools and places it near endpoint protection products.

Cyber Protect is sold in three editions. Standard is intended for environments with fewer than five devices or Windows Server Essentials; Advanced adds endpoint detection and response (cloud deployment only), malware scanning of backups and safe recovery; Backup Advanced adds support for KVM, Nutanix AHV and Red Hat Virtualization plus Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace backup. A licence is required for every machine or physical host, with separate Server, Windows Essentials and Workstation licence types, and each licence includes Acronis cloud storage: 250 GB per server or virtual host, 150 GB per Windows Essentials licence, 50 GB per workstation and 40 GB per public cloud VM. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace backup are sold in five-seat packs on one-, three- or five-year terms. List prices were not displayed on the purchasing page consulted; the company directs buyers to a price configurator.

Druva sells backup as a SaaS service built on what it describes as a cloud-native architecture that works across multiple clouds; its Essentials Pack is marketed as "one platform, one contract, zero infrastructure". Its board includes representatives of Sequoia Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Riverwood Capital, Tenaya Capital and CDPQ.

Druva's pricing page groups coverage into three purchasing routes. Individual workloads are priced by category: data centre (VMs, files, NAS, databases), public cloud (compute, storage, databases), productivity data (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, endpoints), identities (Entra ID, Active Directory, Okta), CRM (Salesforce, Dynamics 365) and AI data including Microsoft 365 Copilot. A SaaS Universal License covers the main SaaS applications and identity systems on a per-user basis with pooled storage. An Essentials Pack for smaller organisations covers SaaS apps, VMware, Nutanix, Hyper-V, Proxmox, file servers, SQL, Oracle, Azure Local and native AWS and Azure services under one contract. The trade-off of the SaaS model is that data sits in Druva-operated storage, recovery speed for large on-premises VMs depends on network bandwidth, and no list prices are published.

Cove Data Protection is the backup service of N-able, a cybersecurity and IT management vendor that reported US$553 million in annual recurring revenue as of 30 September 2026 and says about 500,000 organisations use its platform. N-able's platform spans data protection, security operations and unified endpoint management, and Cove is commonly bought by managed service providers.

Cove is delivered as SaaS: N-able handles patching, security and storage, and no appliances are required. It protects servers, workstations and Microsoft 365, with Google Workspace backup in public preview, and can run backups as often as every 15 minutes; N-able says its TrueDelta technology reduces the volume of redundant data sent. Worldwide cloud storage is included and the product supports image-based recovery and cloud-based disaster recovery without upfront hardware. The cloud-first design keeps operational overhead low for MSPs managing many small clients, but it offers less control over storage location and format than self-hosted software, and N-able does not publish prices.

SIRIS is Datto's business continuity and disaster recovery product, combining an on-site appliance with replication to the Datto Cloud. Datto's privacy, trust-centre and documentation pages are hosted on Kaseya domains, reflecting its place in the Kaseya group, and the product is marketed through managed service provider partners, to whom Datto offers free, unlimited support.

The product's distinguishing feature is recovery verification: AI-based screenshot verification, which Datto says is included at no additional cost and has more than 99% verification accuracy, boots protected systems and checks that services and applications respond. Protected servers or VMs can be virtualised locally on the SIRIS appliance or in the cloud, with direct file restore, bare-metal recovery and Fast Failback also listed. Cloud retention can be infinite or time-based. Datto describes a flat-fee model with free-to-use hardware and no separate charges for cloud ingress, egress or disaster recovery testing, but actual prices are only available on request. Buyers who do not work with an MSP may find the channel model a barrier.

Unitrends, a Kaseya company, sells backup appliances, backup software, disaster recovery as a service and cloud storage, together with SaaS backup for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Salesforce and endpoint backup for PCs, servers and VMs. Its UniView console manages protection across on-premises, cloud, SaaS and endpoint sources.

Unitrends emphasises recovery assurance: Automated Recovery Assurance validates backups at the application level, and BackupIQ provides recommendations and automated actions on recoverability, security and performance. Customers can restore individual files, run workloads on the appliance during an outage, or fail over to the Unitrends Cloud, which the company describes as immutable and hidden from attackers. The current hardware line is the Recovery Series Generation 10, and a FIPS mode is offered for regulated environments. Prices are not published; buyers request a quote. With Datto also inside Kaseya, Unitrends overlaps with SIRIS in the same corporate portfolio, and buyers may want assurance about each product's roadmap.

NAKIVO Backup & Replication is aimed at small and mid-sized organisations and service providers, and the company states that it serves more than 16,000 businesses in 190 countries. It protects VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, Proxmox VE, Microsoft 365, AWS EC2, Windows and Linux servers and Oracle databases, and can be installed directly on NAS devices from ASUSTOR, NETGEAR, QNAP, Synology, TrueNAS and Western Digital. Release 11.2.2 added support for Proxmox VE 9.1 and 9.2.

NAKIVO is one of the few vendors in this list to keep a detailed public price structure. Three editions are offered: Pro Essentials, Enterprise Essentials and Enterprise Plus. Subscriptions are charged per workload per month (Microsoft 365 per user, minimum 10 users; NAS per terabyte) and billed annually upfront, with 20% off three-year terms for workloads. Perpetual licences remain available per CPU socket for virtual environments, per server and per workstation in bundles of five, and per database for Oracle, each including a year of support. The dollar amounts were not visible in the page version consulted. A 15-day full-featured trial requires no credit card.

Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) is the main product of Arcserve, LLC, a long-established backup vendor. UDP protects cloud, on-premises, virtual and hyperconverged workloads, with agentless and agent-based protection for VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV and Proxmox. It offers instant VM and bare-metal recovery, application-consistent backup and orchestrated recovery runbooks.

The product retains features that some newer cloud-first tools have dropped, including global deduplication and tape support, alongside AES/SSL encryption and role-based administration. Automated recovery testing validates recovery time and recovery point objectives and produces audit-ready reports, and the Arcserve Console can be run in the cloud or on premises. Newer additions include AI-driven anomaly detection and an assistant called ArcGenie, both promoted with the Premium edition. UDP is sold in Standard, Advanced and Premium editions, but the product page does not state how licences are calculated or list prices; buyers use online purchase, a demo or a sales contact.

VM Backup, previously marketed under the Altaro name, is a virtual machine backup product from Hornetsecurity, which Proofpoint acquired on 8 December 2025 for total consideration of US$1.8 billion. At the time Hornetsecurity reported annual recurring revenue of nearly US$200 million, more than 12,000 channel partners and MSPs, and more than 125,000 customers. The site now uses "Hornetsecurity by Proofpoint" branding.

VM Backup protects Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware and Proxmox from a single console. Its licensing is unusual for its flexibility: perpetual licences are sold per host with unlimited sockets and VMs in Standard, Unlimited and Unlimited Plus editions, while a monthly subscription for the Unlimited Plus edition is charged per backed-up VM with no upfront cost. Perpetual customers need a Service Maintenance Agreement for support and upgrades. A free edition covers 2 VMs per host with no time limit, and a 30-day trial of the full product is available. Prices were not listed on the page consulted. The product is focused on virtual machines and does not cover the range of physical, SaaS and database sources found in broader suites.

Bacula Enterprise is developed by Bacula Systems, headquartered in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, and is derived from the open-source Bacula project. It is aimed at large and technically demanding environments, and the vendor names customers including NASA (through contractor SSAI), Sky, Swisscom, Warner Bros. Discovery, Booking.com and Texas A&M University.

Coverage is unusually wide at the infrastructure level: hypervisors including VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, OpenStack, Proxmox, Xen, XCP-ng and Nutanix AHV; containers on Docker, Kubernetes and OpenShift; databases including SAP HANA, Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL; tape, NDMP and NAS; and high-performance computing file systems such as GPFS, Lustre and HPSS. The product line includes the BWeb management interface, BGuardian security monitoring and a Sovereign Recovery offering. Bacula Systems states that it does not use capacity-based pricing, so costs do not rise with data volume, but it does not publish prices. The product's configuration model reflects its open-source roots and generally requires more administrator expertise than wizard-driven SMB tools.

Active Backup for Business is a backup application that runs on Synology network-attached storage. Synology describes it as offering unlimited, licence-free backups for any number of computers, servers or virtual machines, which makes the hardware the main cost. It backs up Windows and Linux physical servers as well as computers and virtual machines.

For physical servers it offers bare-metal recovery, instant restore of a server to VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V or Synology Virtual Machine Manager, and P2V recovery that boots a backup image as a VM. Global deduplication and incremental backups reduce storage and transfer volumes; application-consistent backups use VSS and pre-freeze or post-thaw scripts; and users can restore their own files through self-service recovery. Backups can be replicated to another Synology NAS to follow the 3-2-1 rule. The limitations follow from the model: protection depends on Synology hardware, the product lacks the multi-site management, tape and enterprise application coverage of larger suites, and an offsite copy requires a second device or cloud target.