Cohesity NetBackup Appliances vs Commvault VM Backup: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Cohesity NetBackup Appliances

Mid-market and enterprise teams managing ransomware risk at scale need Cohesity NetBackup Appliances because the Isolated Recovery Environment (IRE) actually isolates backups from the production network instead of just claiming to. Support for 800+ workloads means you're not swapping backup vendors when you adopt Kubernetes or migrate workloads, and the multi-layer security architecture addresses both PR.DS and PR.IR under NIST CSF 2.0. Skip this if your primary concern is point-in-time granularity for databases; Cohesity prioritizes recoverability and ransomware resilience over transaction-level recovery windows.

Commvault VM Backup

Mid-market and enterprise teams managing multi-hypervisor environments will get the most from Commvault VM Backup because it actually handles VM migration between platforms without the recovery friction that locks you into a single vendor. The platform covers five hypervisors natively (VMware, Hyper-V, Azure, EC2, Nutanix AHV) with centralized management, and its air-gapped backup copies plus anomaly detection address both ransomware and compliance requirements across NIST RC.RP and PR.DS functions. Skip this if your infrastructure is purely cloud-native and containerized; Commvault's strength is protecting traditional VMs, not Kubernetes workloads.