Wasabi vs Backblaze B2 – Reviewed 2021
Wasabi vs Backblaze B2 Speed test and Pricing review
Updated Jan 2021
In this review, we compare the speed, price and all-round functionality between the Wasabi and Backblaze object storage platforms.
** We don’t receive payment of any type from any of the companies we review. No direct payment, affiliate referral fee or even a freebie.
We use these systems for our core business and collectively between our customers and resellers, use more than 1PB on both services.
Wasabi Technologies, Inc. is a dedicated object storage provider that only does one thing, and that makes them experts at it. Wasabi launched their first hot cloud storage service in May 2017 and was founded by David Friend and Jeff Flowers.
You might not know their names, but you will know the companies they owned; Carbonite, Mozy, and Webroot being the more obvious names.
Clearly, Friend and Flowers know more about cloud storage than most others because they sold their business to Open Text Corporation in November 2019 for $1.42 billion.
This is the reason Wasabi is in our top two recommendations to safely store your data with.
Backblaze are another of the big names in cloud storage and online backups. They started providing cloud backup in 2007, and now offer object storage on their B2 platform. Backblaze launched B2 in 2015; two years before Wasabi turned on their first server.
Both companies are very well matched on paper and in their tech status with both providing 11 nines of data durability on their storage. They have both adopted Amazon’s S3 standard for their object storage. Object storage differs from standard block file systems seen on local and network drives.
Object storage is a term that software developers will be familiar with, and end-users don’t need to worry about. Simply put, object storage just works and keeps your data safe and secure.
Monthly cost to store 1TB of data
Score
1TB storage cost
$5.99
$5
Monthly cost to store and download 1TB of data
Score
1TB storage cost
$5.99
$5
1TB download cost
$0
$10
Monthly cost
$5.99
$15
Quick monthly price comparison between Wasabi and Backblaze B2
There is very little difference in cloud storage pricing between Wasabi and Backblaze B2 object storage. The differences are profound when large quantities of data need to be downloaded because these incur egress charges.
Backblaze are up-front with their pricing, i.e. $0.01 per GB. Wasabi is very keen to say they don’t charge for egress, however, their charging policy is far from unlimited egress. Wasabi will allow you to transfer out for free all the data you are paying to store. If you have 10TB stored, you can download 10TB in one month for free, but not 11TB.
How does this affect bills in a production environment?
If storage is your main business, and your data arrives into the service (ingress), then either service will be comparable on price.
We had this dilemma ourselves when we moved our FileSync collaboration suite from our data centre to the cloud. We naturally wanted to use Microsoft’s Azure as we do with our cloud storage backup service, but doing so would have increased our costs tenfold. AWS wasn’t much better, so we looked at other object storage providers and narrowed our decision down to either Wasabi or Backblaze B2.
Native upload speed comparison between Wasabi and Backblaze B2
We are running a test using the native file upload and download tools from each site. Our test file is 133MB and our test machine is using Windows 10.
Our internet connection is standard fibre broadband with the speed test result shown below.
We are in the UK. Wasabi is in Holland, and Backblaze B2 is in the US.
Wasabi: upload - 1 minute 21 seconds, download - 35 seconds
The data transfer time when uploading to Wasabi was very quick and as expected. We ran the same test ten times and the upload time was consistent. Feedback from our Resellers confirms the outbound transfer speed when restoring data from Wasabi is very good and matches their own internet capacity.
Backblaze B2: upload - 1 minute 48 seconds, download - 47 seconds
Backblaze are approx. 5,300 miles from our test network in the UK, and the speed test was only a few seconds slower than Wasabi. The speed test during restore from Backblaze was what we expected and in-line with our own internet connection speed.
Backblaze is not an obvious choice for our Resellers because their egress charges are high and our UK customers have some concerns with storing their data outside of the UK and EU.
The results are consistent when run 10 times (+ and – 10%), and show a similar speed consider the distances to each service. This shows us the tech is the same and only pricing separates them.
There is a gradual shift amongst our Resellers from storing data on Microsoft’s cloud in the UK to Wasabi in Holland and Backblaze, and this continues.
We have run the same tests on all major object storage providers
As you can see from the image below, once we start looking at the bigger players like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, the price difference for object storage (storing, and downloading) is even greater. The object storage providers have very similar costs when it comes to uploading and storing data, however, there are massive differences when transferring data out of their data centres. These extra costs are normally the egress charges.
Click on the image to read the full review. These are all based on the monthly cost to store and download 1TB of data.
Conclusion:
Both Wasabi and Backblaze’s object storage provide secure online backup providers with a secure and durable cloud storage service that is easy to connect to. They have both adopted Amazon’s S3 object storage standard that makes it super-easy for developers to work with them.
The price of both services is very cost-effective and is priced lower than what any cloud storage provider can build their own platform for.
The Backblaze B2 review confirms the B2 pricing is the same as Wasabi’s. Even though Backblaze are thousands of kilometres away from our test machine, the Backblaze speed test is on a par with Wasabi’s speed test.
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