Check Out These 8 Smarsh Alternatives Before You Buy

Commvault offers a wide variety of products and services, from backup and disaster recovery to cloud management. Commvault’s email archiving, in particular, was designed with business continuity, information availability and regulatory compliance in mind.

The basic version of Commvault’s email archiver includes such features as custom retention policies, automated email collection, full content indexing and end user search, and integrates seamlessly with multiple mail vendors, including Microsoft, Google and Zimbra. Users who require litigation and compliance capabilities can purchase Commvault’s eDiscovery toolset separately. Commvault offers three deployment options for its email archiving service: on-premises, public or private cloud or SaaS-based.

Veritas (formerly Symantec) Enterprise Vault makes it easy for users to create custom policy-based email retention frameworks, quickly search through archives and review electronic communications for compliance purposes. Veritas also consistently receives praise for its customization options, Single Instance Storage (SIS) and its ability to import PST files, though some users have criticized this last feature for being slow. Pricing for Enterprise Vault starts at $7.52 per user/month for email archiving, and $9.19 per user/month to archive additional content types.

Mimecast’s Enterprise Information Archiving system is a popular Smarsh alternative due to its emphasis on security, amongst other things. Mimecast stores all emails in an AES-encrypted archive, so users never have to worry about attackers gaining access to private data, and the system’s spam filtering functionality is so thorough that it sometimes even blocks emails from known senders.

In addition to robust security features, Mimecast makes it easy for users to quickly retrieve archived emails with the system’s advanced search functionality, which is particularly useful when businesses receive eDiscovery and litigation requests or for ensuring regulatory compliance. Mimecast creates triplicate copies of all incoming and outgoing emails, as well, in case a message is ever accidentally deleted or a disaster should occur that would jeopardize a company’s data.

Unlike other email archiving vendors, Mimecast pricing is based on the number of employees in an organization rather than the volume of email storage.

According to its product page, ArcServe UDP Archiving is designed to help reduce the complexity of email archiving and compliance with on-premises, private and public cloud solutions. UDP Archiving automates email retention and encryption, enables users to set custom retention policies and periods and offers granular searches against all email data. UDP Archiving also uses SIS, which reduces archival storage on an organization’s server. ArcServe UDP Archiving is still fairly new to the market, but already a promising Smarsh alternative.

Intradyn provides a convenient, centralized archival platform for all forms of communication: email, social media, instant messaging and more. With an extensive feature set that includes granular email retention, custom retention policies, backup and disaster recovery capabilities, a built-in legal and eDiscovery toolset and advanced reporting, Intradyn is well-equipped to help businesses take on any archiving-related challenge, from Right to Know inquiries to ensuring regulatory compliance to risk assessment.

Email Archiver, Social Media Archiver and SMS/Text Message Archiver — all part of Intradyn’s archiving platform — are available in three deployment models: virtual, cloud-based and physical hardware appliance. Intradyn’s Email Archiver seamlessly integrates with Exchange On-Premise, Exchange Online (Office 365), Google Vault and both IMAP and POP. Pricing for Email Archiver starts at $4 per user/month for up to 1,000 users, making it an affordable option for businesses of all sizes and a perfect Smarsh alternative.

Like other entries on this list, Proofpoint Enterprise Archive was built with compliance and eDiscovery in mind. Enterprise Archive offers archiving for a wide variety of electronic messages, including email, enterprise collaboration data, social media data and SMS messages. The service’s basic package includes standard archiving, eDiscovery and compliance capabilities including a robust search feature, policy-driven retention and self-service control for legal teams, though users can add on eDiscovery visualization and machine learning analytics and Intelligent Supervision for an additional cost.

Barracuda’s archiving service has made waves due to its ease-of-use, reliability and efficiency. A 100% cloud-based solution, Barracuda creates an unmodified copy of every message that passes through a business’ mail server and stores it in an archive accessible from any device.

This popular Smarsh alternative boasts a long list of features, including instant message archiving, historical data importation, mailbox folder synchronization, message tagging and a standalone desktop search. Barracuda archiving integrates with a number of on-premises and cloud-based web clients, including Gmail, Office 365 and Exchange. Barracuda’s pricing structure includes four different configuration-based plans, starting at $4,000 and running upwards of $400,000.

MailStore Home remains a perennial favorite amongst businesses on a budget due to the fact that it provides reliable email archiving capabilities — including full-text search, mobile archiving and one-click restoration — for free. MailStore backs up all emails into a central archive, eliminating the need for an external database management system.

There are a few drawbacks to using MailStore Home — namely, that the system can be sluggish and lacks in-app support — however, its affordability can’t be beat. Users looking for additional features, such as the ability to store emails within their own self-contained MailStore instance, should look into purchasing either MailStore Server or MailStore Service Provider Edition. Prices for MailStore Server start at $38 per user/year for up to nine users and includes one year of Standard Update & Support Service.

Ready to make the switch from Smarsh? With a dizzying number of alternatives on the market to choose from, it can be hard to decide which one has the right array of features, the quality support and the best price for your business. Before investing in an email archiving solution, consider testing out a few different options, starting with Intradyn. Our team is at the ready to answer any questions you might have, walk you through our archiving system’s extensive feature set and schedule your free trial so you can witness the power of Intradyn firsthand. Contact us today to get started.