Dear piler-users,
I got a request recently to compare piler with office 365 and google
vault.
Since both google and o365 offer a cloud based solution with some minor
or perhaps
not so minor differences between them, I put both them to the blue
corner against
piler in the red corner. Please note that this is my somewhat subjective
opinion,
and as usual, your mileage may wary. Also feel free to add your own
thoughts to
the matter.
If you already have your messaging at Google or o365, then it's a
trivial choice
to use their email archiving solutions. When I heard that o365 had been
launched
and offering archiving as well, I saw lots of commercial archiving
vendors writing
blog posts justifying their values, and showing (or at least trying) why
their
products are far superior to both G vault and O365. Though their
arguments were
valid, I noticed some fear of losing some of their market share as well.
I believe that each solutions have pros and cons, and your task is to
find the
best solution matching your needs.
Advantages of G Suite/O365
---------------------------
- saas solution, ready to use without much hassle or fuss
- easy to calculate monthly/yearly costs (opex only)
- no need to buy a server
- no need to hire a Linux ninja to run your archive
- includes the mail hosting*
- monthly fee includes support**
- strong companies behind them
Drawbacks of G Suite/O365
-------------------------
- extra cost*** for the archiving feature
i) Google Business costs +$6/mo/user, $7200/100 user/year (compared to
the Basic plan)
ii) Office 365 E3 costs +$12/mo/user, $14000/100 user/year (compared
to E1 plan)
- suspend users that have left the company (rather than delete them) to
retain their data
- only available in the cloud. Some organizations must keep their data
on premise
- restore message to the inbox is quite complicated for G vault
- lack of the ability to import legacy emails****
- difficulties keeping the archive when migrating to another mail
provider
*: No doubt, running your mail hosting for yourself requires pretty
decent Linux
and other tech skills, eg. setup some sort of spam and other malware
protection,
not to mention the backup, high availability, and other ninja level
stuff
**: I haven't used their support, so I cannot confirm their quality,
responsiveness, etc
***: To be fair I have to acknowledge that the bigger/more expensive
plans usually
offer more for the extra besides archiving, eg. more services or more
storage, etc.
****: I couldn't find it how to import legacy emails to G vault in the
docs. O365 supports
importing from pst files, but it still sucks an is painful (though it's
true for any migration
involving TBs of data, so it's partly not o365's fault).
Advantages of piler
-------------------
- open source
- no extra cost
- lots of handy features
- easy to import legacy emails
- exports to standard format -> easy to leave piler for another product
- you can keep your archive even if you migrate to another mail provider
- good fit if you want to keep your data on premise
- you can customize it
- nice support***** :-)
Drawbacks of piler
------------------
- you need a host and it costs (capex) ******
- it requires a pretty skilled Linux ninja to setup and run it for
yourself
(70+% of the issues stem from missing some skills, or simply
understanding how piler works)
- despite I do pushups, I'm not so strong like G or o365
- you have to backup for yourself
*****: even though I have some stuck issues in bitbucket
******: you can still deploy piler to the cloud, eg. aws, azure, ...
which is still opex
Sources:
- https://blog.microfocus.com/top-10-google-vault-archiving-drawbacks/
-
https://spanning.com/blog/google-vault-and-spanning-backup-two-great-products-two-different-purposes/
-
https://www.damsoncloud.com/2017/03/third-party-backups-essential-even-use-google-vault/
-
https://www.quora.com/If-youre-using-Google-Apps-what-email-archival-system-if-any-do-you-use
- https://www.intradyn.com/email-archiving-alternative-google-vault/
-
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2015/05/07/making-email-archive-migration-easier-with-the-office-365-import-service/
So that's it, let me know what you think.
Janos
PS: before you ask: since I was working for a service provider in the
past, piler is an obvious choice for me
