Veeam vs Rubrik vs Cohesity: ransomware-proof backup for 500 to 2,000 seats

The constraint that decides it

Immutability is no longer the differentiator. All three platforms can hold copies that cannot be altered for a set period, and all three sell a second copy for the case where the primary site is lost. The split is whether that second copy is a separate trust domain, and whether the vendor will put a number on it before a quote.

Veeam is the only one of the three publishing a per-terabyte cloud price: $14 per TB per month for Vault Foundation and $24 for Advanced, with an Archive tier at $4.50. Rubrik and Cohesity publish no list price for their vaults. Vendr's deal data puts Rubrik software at $200 to $500 per TB a year and Cohesity at $150 to $400, a band wide enough to change the answer at 100 TB.

How the immutability is built

Veeam's on-premises answer is a hardened repository on a Linux server. When the repository is added, the administrator sets the period during which backup files cannot be moved, modified or deleted, though they can still be copied. Access uses single-use credentials that are not stored in the backup infrastructure, so a compromised backup server does not hand over the repository, and the connection uses a SHA256RSA certificate with a 2048-bit key.

Rubrik describes air-gapped, immutable backups and infected snapshot isolation as part of its platform, so a suspect copy is separated before recovery. Cohesity FortKnox copies data into a vault isolated from production networks, locks immutable snapshots, scans for anomalies and then restores. FortKnox is the clearest example of a separate trust domain; Veeam's hardened repository is not air-gapped by itself, which is why the Vault tier exists.

The cloud tier is where the bill moves

Veeam bills Vault annually upfront per terabyte, and the price includes the API calls needed to write in an immutable format plus reads and egress within a fair-use allowance. Archive is $4.50 per TB per month, Foundation $14 and Advanced $24. Foundation carries 11 nines of durability on locally redundant storage and Advanced up to 12 nines with zone redundancy. Archive retrieval is billed separately.

For a 100 TB estate, the Veeam cloud copy costs $16,800 a year at Foundation. Vendr's bands put Cohesity's SaaS data protection at $20,000 to $50,000 for the same capacity and Rubrik Cloud Vault at $25,000 to $60,000. Those are different products with different retention and isolation terms, so the comparison is a floor, not a like-for-like quote. It still shows how much of the decision the cloud tier carries. The Veeam rate is flat, so its cloud line scales linearly with capacity, while the appliance-based quotes from Rubrik and Cohesity bundle compute and capacity, which is why their per-TB figure moves with node count and retention.

Restore time: two published claims and one absence

Veeam publishes retrieval times rather than a workload RTO: minutes from Vault Foundation and Advanced, and more than 15 hours from Archive, which is the tier priced at $4.50. Foundation restore is fair use, capped at 20 percent of subscribed capacity a year, while Advanced is unlimited. Cohesity publishes more: 1,000 VMs recovered instantly, restores twice as fast and an 18x backup improvement, with FortKnox adding recovery in minutes from the vault.

Rubrik's product page says it recovers to a clean point and restores operations fast, but it publishes no time. That absence is the finding. A buyer comparing RTOs gets a defensible number from two vendors and a claim from the third, and none of the three publishes a whole-estate recovery time, which is the number a ransomware plan actually needs. Ask for the recovery sequence for the ten systems that matter, not the fastest single VM.

What each vendor publishes about price

Veeam meters licenses per workload and sells through resellers, with enterprise pricing handled by its sales team. That leaves the public per-workload number to third parties: Vendr puts Veeam at $50 to $150 per VM a year depending on edition and volume. Rubrik prices per TB, at $200 to $500 a year in Vendr's data, with an entry-level appliance node at $60,000 to $90,000. Cohesity prices per TB at $150 to $400, with a node at $50,000 to $75,000 and support at 18 to 22 percent of license value.

The licensing shape matters more than the headline rate. A 500-seat estate with 100 TB of protected data pays per VM under Veeam and per TB under the other two, so the same estate can look cheap on one model and expensive on another. Model both at your own VM-to-terabyte ratio before the first call.

The decision rule

Choose Veeam if a published per-terabyte cloud price and an on-premises Linux hardened repository decide it. It is the only one of the three that lets a buyer price the cloud copy without a sales call, and the $14 Foundation rate is the number to hold the others against. The cost is operational: the hardened repository is a Linux server the team has to run.

Choose Cohesity if an appliance and a separate vault are mandatory and the per-TB rate is the yardstick. At 100 TB its software band starts below Rubrik's, and FortKnox is a product rather than a configuration. Choose Rubrik if the platform's isolation and recovery orchestration fit the estate and the per-TB premium is acceptable. On Vendr's bands the Rubrik and Cohesity software lines differ by $5,000 to $10,000 a year at 100 TB, which is small against the cost of a failed recovery and large enough to negotiate.