Top 5 DataCove Alternatives for Email Archiving

As one of the pioneers of email archiving, the DataCove email archiver used to exceed all compliance, ediscovery, and investigatory needs an organization had.

But while DataCove offers fast search and retrieval, audit trails, granular retention policies, and automated archiving, it has many problems holding it back from being the best email archiving solution.

Some problems with DataCove in 2024:

• SATA-Based Lower-End Appliances – The lower-end appliances of DataCove are SATA-based. This can be a disadvantage in terms of speed, data protection, and cost optimization. SATA controllers may compromise efficiency and reduce the reliability of the system.
• PST Import and Export Limitations – Another issue with DataCove’s email archiving solution is that the import and export of PST (Personal Storage Table) files are only possible through a separate tool. This additional step can complicate the process, particularly when handling larger exports or imports, making it less user-friendly and potentially more time-consuming.
• Outdated user interface – Since its inception, DataCove’s interface hasn’t been changed too much and may feel outdated to new users with most of its features being hard to find or not intuitive enough to use.

With all of these problems, we’ve compiled a list of our top 5 picks for the best DataCove alternatives that will satisfy your business’ email archiving needs.

Jatheon

Jatheon offers a cloud-based data archiving solution tailor-made for businesses of all sizes within regulated industries, providing essential features to ensure your business’s compliance.

It offers a unified archiving solution that covers all communication channels, including Email, Social Media, WhatsApp, and Text Message archiving, all stored in a single, easily searchable database.

With its modern user-friendly interface and mobile access, it offers full customization to data access, administration roles, and an easily scalable database.

Its key selling points are the complete compliance and ediscovery feature set including Advanced Search (with 20+ search criteria, proximity, and fuzzy operators), integrated redaction feature, legal hold and retention tags, and automated retention policies.

Along with its feature set, Jatheon provides its users with excellent technical support from the implementation stage and throughout the use of the software. Their customer support is very fast in response and available 24/7 on different platforms like email, built-in, and phone which makes it easy for anyone to understand the software and fix potential issues.

If your organization needs a DataCove alternative with a richer feature set and more reliable technical support, Jatheon is the best solution on the market.

Office 365

Office 365 offers several products and services alongside its email archiving solution. This has led many organizations to switch to the Office 365 ecosystem including their email communication.

Its main advantage lies in great integration with the existing infrastructure.

However, Microsoft doesn’t specialize in archiving, leaving Office 365 without some of the basic archiving features like legacy imports, large exports, and permission levels.

Its search capabilities, while great for email, aren’t suited to go through millions of emails and find what you are looking for making it a huge drawback for ediscovery.

Microsoft is trying to fix its archiving issues with its Microsoft Exchange platform, which is a separate service dedicated to compliance archiving.

Barracuda

Barracuda has been a recognizable name and a trustworthy provider of not only email archiving, but also complementary products and services like web filtering, firewalls, and security programs.

Barracuda’s key archiving feature Barracuda Message Archiver allows users to expand their storage capacities through stackable appliances as well as carry out combined searches.

One of its strong points is easy access via mobile and desktop, as well as free hardware refresh (though this depends on your pricing plan).

Barracuda also provides archiving support for non-email content and instant messages, making it a very versatile tool for compliance archiving.

While Barracuda offers a great archiving solution, its search isn’t the fastest when searching through bigger databases which can hinder your ability to respond to data requests.

Besides this, Barracuda also doesn’t support EML or PDF exporting which some users might find necessary depending on their use case, and if you’re looking to switch to Barracuda, be aware that importing legacy data can be a problematic process.

Smarsh

Smarsh is a global leader and a recognizable name in the archiving industry. The company mainly focuses on the public sector and the financial services industry.

Apart from email archiving, Smarsh offers a separate ediscovery and supervision service that integrates with their archive, meaning you will need more than one tool.

Smarsh gets points for the variety of services and capabilities it offers (various packages and the capacity to archive social media, text messages, and websites) and the ability to export data to multiple formats.

As a cloud-based platform, Smarsh offers almost unlimited storage that can be scaled up or down based on the organization’s needs. However, customers cite problems with its search speed, unavailability, unscheduled maintenance, and lack of documentation and training.

On top of that, Smarsh has a very complicated pricing structure that may leave you paying several times more than what you initially believed.

Intradyn

Intradyn is a niche player that can archive various types of data like email, social media, and text messaging available as three deployment models — on-premise, cloud, and virtual.

Intradyn’s main solution is its Email Archiver, which has great compliance and ediscovery capabilities. It’s often praised for its search functionality, intuitive user interface, data retention policies, redaction feature, and backup.

One frequently criticized aspect of Intradyn is its reliance on stubbing for storage reduction and the fact that it can’t export files to PST directly. This means that users need a third-party tool to ensure the smooth export of their data.

On the flip side, Intradyn relies on stubbing for storage reduction and cannot export files to PST directly. This means it could be difficult to handle large PST exports.

If you’re a large organization looking for an in-house archiving solution, Intradyn may not be the best option for you as their hardware isn’t the most reliable.

Conclusion

Data archiving is one of the most important aspects of any organization looking to stay away from lawsuits and fines based on their ability to comply.

Unfortunately, DataCove isn’t a viable solution anymore.

If your organization needs a DataCove alternative with a richer feature set and more reliable technical support, these alternatives might provide better value for money.

About the Author

Steven Tobolar

Steven Tobolar is Jatheon’s Head of Tech Support and an experienced engineer specializing in large-scale migration projects, AWS, Exchange Servers, and Microsoft Azure. Outside work, he enjoys reading, movies, off-road driving, and mountain biking.