VPS Snaps vs SimpleBackups
They do more. We cost a third as much.
SimpleBackups backs up things we don't touch — Redis, GitHub, Notion, whole buckets — and charges $49 where we charge $15. Which matters more depends on what you run.
Backup Jobs
Automated backup schedules
postgres-main nightly
Last run 6h ago
web-01 snapshots
Last run 9h ago
api-prod volumes
Last run 4m ago
staging-db weekly
Last run 3d ago
The short version
We wrote both columns. If the left one describes you, buy theirs — you will be happier and we would rather not have the churn.
Pick SimpleBackups if…
Seven situations where they are the better answer, two of which are whole categories we have nothing for.
- You need Redis. We back up PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB and MongoDB; Redis is on their list and not on ours.
- You want your SaaS accounts backed up too. They cover GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Notion, Linear, Knack and Tadabase. We cover none of that and have no plans to.
- You want bucket-to-bucket replication — copying one object store to another on a schedule. They do it; we do not.
- You would rather one vendor held the storage as well as the schedule. Every paid tier of theirs includes storage, from 50 GB up to 1 TB. Ours include none, by choice.
- You are big enough that a hundred backups on a single plan is the right shape, or you need SAML SSO, an SLA or a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement — that is their Enterprise tier and we have no equivalent.
- You want anomaly detection, on every paid tier of theirs from Lite up. We tell you when a scheduled run did not happen, and when a job has gone longer than its own schedule allows without a successful backup. That is a narrower thing: we are not watching for a backup that ran and looked wrong.
- You want backups encrypted, or file backups that send only what changed. Their pricing page lists backup encryption on every plan and incremental file backups from Lite up. Ours make a full archive on every run and do not encrypt it themselves.
Pick VPS Snaps if…
Seven situations where we are.
- You want the lower price, and it is not close. Their entry paid tier is $49/mo against our $15; billed annually it is $39 against our $10. The tier above is $99 against our $45, or $79 against $30.
- What you actually need is servers, databases, Docker volumes, files and Kubernetes, and the things around them: test restores, uptime monitoring and a way back when a server dies. That is our whole scope, and it is why we cost a third as much.
- You run WordPress sites with no SSH access. Our plugin backs those up from inside WordPress itself, which is a different problem from backing up a server.
- You want chat alerts on every plan including Free — Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat and Discord, with no upsell.
- You want a restore you can rehearse before you need it. Database, file and Docker runs, Kubernetes runs taken with Velero, WordPress sites and whole applications restore from the dashboard onto any server in your workspace: the archive is checked against the checksum recorded when it was taken, whatever it is about to overwrite is backed up first, and a check-only mode proves the whole path works without changing anything. Scheduled test restores go further: a throwaway server on your own cloud account, the newest backup restored onto it, the data checked, the server deleted.
- You want the server watched, and a way back when it is gone. Uptime monitors and status pages come with every paid plan, and from Standard up Recover now builds a replacement server on your own cloud account from the newest snapshot or backups. Their pricing page lists neither.
- You want the gaps written down. Our features page carries a published list of what we cannot do yet, and this page names seven things they do better.
Price, tier by tier
Both products at both billing cadences, matched by tier position. Every figure in their column was seen rendered on their pricing page rather than calculated.
| Tier | VPS Snaps | SimpleBackups | Their tier includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freevs their Basic | $0/mo | $0/mo | 1 backup · 1 GB storage · Daily |
| Startervs their Lite | $15/mo$10/mo billed annually | $49/mo$39/mo billed annually | 5 backups · 50 GB storage · Up to 12h |
| Standardvs their Plus | $45/mo$30/mo billed annually | $99/mo$79/mo billed annually | 20 backups · 200 GB storage · Up to 1h |
| Provs their Max | $85/mo$57/mo billed annually | $299/mo$239/mo billed annually | 100 backups · 1 TB storage · Up to 5 min |
SimpleBackups prices, tiers, cadences and included storage above were read from simplebackups.com/pricing in October 2026, with both billing states of their toggle captured — their annual figures are calculated in the browser and never appear in a fetch of the page, so both had to be seen. They are not the advertised 20% applied arithmetically: 20% off $49 is $39.20 and they charge $39, so every annual figure here is one that has actually been seen rendered. The backup types in their column come from their own product pages; where those pages do not say, the cell reads "Not stated" — which is a fact about their marketing, not about their software. Prices and features may have changed since. Our column is read live from the plan records this app enforces.
The rows line up by position, not by equivalence. Their tiers count “included backups” while ours count servers and backup jobs separately, and every paid tier of theirs carries storage that ours does not. Read the price difference as the cost of a narrower product, not as the same thing sold cheaper. Above Max they sell an Enterprise tier with custom pricing, SAML SSO and an SLA; we have nothing at that shape.
Two whole categories we do not have
Worth being blunt about, because no amount of price difference fixes a missing capability.
SaaS backups. They back up GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Notion, Linear and Knack. We back up none of those. If what keeps you awake is a Notion workspace or a GitHub organisation rather than a server, we are not the product — and adding it is not on our roadmap, because it is a different business from backing up infrastructure.
Bucket replication. They copy one object store to another on a schedule. We don't: a bucket is read back only to restore or verify one of your own backups, never copied somewhere else.
And one engine: Redis. Ours is PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB and MongoDB, all four of which back up and restore from the dashboard.
What we have that they do not publish
A WordPress plugin. A site on shared hosting has no SSH and no API — the plugin runs inside WordPress and backs the site up from there. It is on the WordPress directory.
Provider snapshots across eight clouds, each calling the cloud’s own API so the image lives in your account and survives cancelling us — see the provider pages.
Both are stated as things we do. Their pages do not mention either, which is not the same as their product lacking them — see the note under the table.
Line by line
Every cell in their column was read off one of their public pages. Where those pages are silent it says so, rather than guessing.
| Capability | VPS Snaps | SimpleBackups |
|---|---|---|
| What gets backed up | ||
| PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB | ||
| MongoDB | ||
| Redis | ||
| Files and directories over SSH | ||
| Docker volumes and compose files | Not stated | |
| Kubernetes | ||
| Provider snapshots | 8 clouds | Server and volume snapshots |
| WordPress from inside WordPress | Not stated | |
| SaaS accounts (GitHub, Notion, Linear…) | ||
| Bucket-to-bucket replication | ||
| Where backups live | ||
| Your own S3-compatible bucket | ||
| Storage included in the plan | 1 GB – 1 TB | |
| Storage resold by the vendor | ||
| Reach and alerting | ||
| Servers with no inbound route | ||
| Email alerts | ||
| Anomaly detection | Missed and overdue backups only | Lite and up |
| Slack, Teams, Google Chat, Discord | All plans | Lite and up (channels not named) |
| Custom webhook | Agency | Not stated |
| Recovery, monitoring and compliance | ||
| Backup encryption | ||
| Incremental file backups | Lite and up | |
| Snapshot replication | Plus and up | |
| Scheduled test restores on a throwaway server | Opt-in per job | Not stated |
| Recovery server built on your own cloud, or another provider when yours is down | Standard and up | Not stated |
| Uptime monitoring and status pages | Starter and up | Not stated |
| Cloudflare DNS backups | Every plan | Not stated |
| Disaster recovery planning | Continuity Plan, Pro and up | Disaster Recovery dashboard, Plus and up |
| Audit evidence (ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA) | Mapped in the Continuity Plan | Audit exports, Max |
| HIPAA Business Associate Agreement | Enterprise | |
FAQs
Can’t find the answer you’re looking for? Reach out to our support team.
Is this comparison fair? You wrote it.
Judge it by what it concedes. The list above says they beat us on seven things, including two whole categories we have nothing for. Every claim in their column was read off simplebackups.com and where their pages do not say, the cell says 'Not stated' rather than 'no'. The one thing we will not do is invent a weakness for them.
Why is their pricing so much higher?
Mostly because it buys more. Their plans bundle storage — 50 GB on Lite, up to 1 TB on Max — and cover backup types we do not touch at all, like SaaS accounts and bucket replication. If you need those, the price is doing real work. If you only need servers and databases going into a bucket you already pay for, you are buying capability you will not use.
Why don't the tiers line up exactly?
Because the two products count differently. They sell 'included backups'; we sell a server allowance and a backup-job allowance separately, so five of their backups is not five of anything on our side. The table matches tiers by position, which is the closest honest alignment and still an approximation. Compare the plan that fits your infrastructure rather than the row that shares a line.
Are their annual prices right?
They were read off their pricing page with the yearly toggle switched on, not calculated. That distinction matters more than it sounds: their page advertises 20% off, but 20% off $49 is $39.20 and they charge $39. Multiplying would have produced three numbers that were close enough to look correct and were not one of their real prices.
Do you back up MongoDB or Redis?
MongoDB yes, Redis no. MongoDB jobs run mongodump on the same schedules, retention and alerting as everything else, and a MongoDB run restores from the dashboard onto any server in your workspace like the SQL engines do — mongorestore is rehearsed with --dryRun before anything is dropped. Redis is not on our list and there is no timeline for it — if that is what you need backed up, theirs covers it and ours does not.
Everything else it does
Storage, schedules, alerts, recovery and team access, in one place. Which plan each one starts on is on the pricing page.
- Bring your own storage
- Backups land in your own S3-compatible bucket — Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2, or plain S3 — or in your own Google Drive, Box, Dropbox or OneDrive. You hold the keys and the data.
- Snapshots stay with your provider
- Provider snapshots are created through the provider's own API and never leave your account. We store the snapshot ID, not the image.
- Eight providers, one dashboard
- DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode, AWS EC2, AWS Lightsail, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure — scheduled and reviewed from the same place.
- A replacement server on demand
- Recover now builds a new server on your own DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode, AWS EC2, AWS Lightsail, Azure or Google Compute Engine account, from its snapshot or from its backups, software included.
- Failover on any cloud
- When a server stops answering, its traffic moves to the recovery server: by reserved or floating IP where your cloud has one, or by your DNS on Cloudflare, which works on every cloud.
- Know it's down, with the way back
- Uptime monitors for sites, ports and scheduled jobs confirm an outage before alerting, name the server's newest backup, and publish a status page. On paid plans.
- Your DNS zones, backed up
- Every record in a Cloudflare zone, kept in your own storage as a BIND file too. A restore previews what differs and writes back only that.
- Schedules that fit your traffic
- Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or a fixed interval in minutes — anchored to your timezone, so a 02:00 job stays at 02:00 across a DST change.
- Retention that prunes itself
- Set how many days to keep. Older snapshots and archives are cleaned up after each successful run, so storage bills stay flat.
- Every run on record
- Status, duration, size and trigger, with each step it took in order and its warnings and errors kept in place — so a failure tells you which step broke.
- Checksummed on upload
- Every archive is hashed as it streams to your bucket and the checksum is stored with the run, so you can verify what landed.
- Run on demand
- Trigger any job by hand before a migration or a risky deploy, without touching its schedule or its retention window.
- Alerts on five channels
- Email plus Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and Discord — on success, on failure, and on a job that missed its schedule entirely.
- Encrypted credentials
- SSH keys, database passwords, and storage secrets are sealed with AES-256-GCM before they touch the database.
- Team access with roles
- Invite your team into a shared workspace as owner, admin, or member, so backups outlive whoever set them up.
“I wanted reliable backups without building and maintaining another internal system. With VPS Snaps, our production database and application files are backed up automatically to storage we control, and retention is handled for us. It's one less piece of infrastructure I have to think about.”
Back up your first server free, forever.
If you need Redis, a Notion workspace or a bucket copied to another bucket, buy theirs — this page says so plainly. If you need servers and databases in a bucket you already own, start free and see whether the cheaper, narrower product is the one you actually wanted.
No credit card required. Cancel anytime.