AvePoint Confidence Platform vs Cohesity SmartFiles: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

AvePoint Confidence Platform

Mid-market and enterprise teams managing Microsoft 365 and hybrid cloud environments should evaluate AvePoint Confidence Platform for its data governance automation and multi-SaaS backup capabilities that actually reduce manual policy enforcement overhead. The platform covers critical NIST asset management and data security functions across 14 Azure data centers, with workspace provisioning automation that addresses the operational friction most teams face post-migration. Skip this if your organization runs primarily on non-Microsoft infrastructure or relies heavily on incident response automation; AvePoint's strength is preventing issues through lifecycle management rather than detecting them in flight.

Cohesity SmartFiles

Mid-market and enterprise teams managing hybrid cloud file storage will get the most from Cohesity SmartFiles because its AI-driven anomaly detection catches ransomware and exfiltration patterns that static policies miss, backed by immutable snapshots that actually survive encryption attacks. The integrated antivirus scanning and machine learning-based file access monitoring cover DE.CM and PR.DS effectively, though recovery orchestration after an incident still depends on your runbooks outside the platform. Skip this if you need a pure object storage play; SmartFiles tilts toward unstructured file workloads where behavioral analytics matter more than scale.