Nasuni vs. Egnyte: Why Enterprises Choose Nasuni
Product Marketing Director Lance Shaw discusses the differences between Nasuni vs. Egnyte, and why AEC enterprises prefer Nasuni.
January 15, 2025 | Lance Shaw

In our fifteen years as a company, we’ve dealt with just about every type of competitor, ranging from longstanding giants to hyper-specific startup solutions targeting a small subset of our use cases. Some of these companies have conducted professional, hard-fought campaigns to win over our customers. Others have opted for ill-informed claims, forcing us to involve our legal team to get them to take down completely inaccurate information. At one trade show, a competitor even asked one of our customers to forfeit his Nasuni swag. They actually requested that he give them his Nasuni socks. And he was wearing the socks.
We do things differently at Nasuni. The competition for enterprise IT attention is fierce, with every Google search returning numerous sponsored links, but we stay out of the proverbial mud because that’s not who we are as a company.
Yet it is important to set the record straight now and then.
In recent months, our customers tell us that a startup named Egnyte has been running a campaign against Nasuni in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. Our primary competition continues to be traditional storage giants like NetApp, but Egnyte seems to misunderstand what the Nasuni File Data Platform does for customers and perhaps how it works. The technical explanations are here for anyone interested, and we thought we’d clarify a few key points for IT professionals inside and outside the AEC industry.
First, however, I should note that Egnyte can be a reasonable fit for you if your organization is limited in size, with one or two offices and a handful of small workgroups. The feedback on their user interface is positive, and small AEC organizations without plans for future growth may find Egnyte attractive. For most fast-moving and growing companies, a more robust approach to managing files in the cloud is in order, and we work with hundreds of AEC firms in that phase of their journey.
The following five characteristics of Nasuni technology capture the key differences.
1. Scalable
This word is all over our website, customer stories, social messaging, and the rest of the Nasuni content universe, but I’m starting to wonder if we don’t talk about scale enough. This is perhaps the most important technical difference between Nasuni and Egnyte or any other file services solution. Our technology was uniquely architected to take advantage of the cloud while providing access to a single volume from any number of locations. That means files of any size or complexity, including AutoCAD, BIM, and 3D models for the AEC industry. It means any number of offices or users. No matter how large your files, data volumes, or organization as a whole, Nasuni has you covered.
Today, Nasuni serves 5,500 global AEC offices and job sites alone, plus many more at other customers. We have 1,000+ enterprise customers. Nasuni shines at scale.
2. Tested
More than 250 large AEC firms depend on Nasuni today. Our platform has 66 PB of cloud-hosted AEC design files alone under management. Our AEC customers include AECOM, The Walsh Group, Leo A Daly, Perkins + Will, and other industry giants we are not at liberty to name. The AEC industry has been a critical one for us because two of our very first large customers were in construction and architecture. As our founder explains in his recent post, the IT leaders at these companies helped steer the direction of our product and company.
A long time ago, we made the choice to design a product and company that would meet the needs of regional or global enterprises with dozens to hundreds of locations. We added and optimized file synchronization because these firms requested it. We built our global file locking capabilities because they needed it, and Nasuni has successfully instituted 26 billion file locks to avoid version conflicts and keep project teams running full speed.
Plus, we made sure our technology worked with every type of AEC file, no matter how large or complex, because we did not want to limit our customers in any way. If you offer a solution that can’t work with BIM models, you should not be serving the AEC market.
While AEC is important to us, this focus on flexibility and scale also allowed us to expand our potential reach and meet the needs of customers across multiple industries, from media and marketing to health services. We built a unified enterprise platform that vastly expanded our market.
3. Secure
The Nasuni File Data Platform continuously versions files to the cloud as they change. This is one of the early architectural design choices that allowed for rapid file synchronization at a global scale, but it also means our customers no longer have to rely on backups or tape. All files are automatically protected in immutable object storage. This architecture allows our customers to rapidly recover from disasters, accidental deletions, or even ransomware attacks.
The IT professionals at our customers often talk about how the first time they had to restore a file with Nasuni, it blew them away because it was so fast and so easy. This applies to all files, including 3D renderings and large, complex CAD models or BIM files.
You can’t do that with traditional backup solutions.
4. Simple
Storage and global synchronization at scale, built-in data protection, data intelligence — all these capabilities and others are delivered through the single easy-to-use Nasuni platform. You simplify your IT stack by relying on one versatile platform instead of multiple point solutions. That means you have one throat to choke, to quote the old IT adage, but you’re also dealing with a world-class customer success team that is going to tap into our experience with our 1,000-plus large customers to analyze, prioritize, and ultimately solve any issues fast.
5. Efficient
The simplicity and proven reliability at scale help our customers keep projects on time and on budget. One global AEC giant reduced edge infrastructure costs by 90% across hundreds of sites. A U.S.-based firm reported a 67% drop in edge storage costs. Again, this applies across industries. Advertising creatives can collaborate more efficiently between studios and offices. Gaming giants can institute follow-the-sun workflows to keep a new release moving from updates to testing and quality assurance. Global energy brands can share seismic data with geophysicists around the world to ensure new discoveries are analyzed rapidly.
This reliable efficiency is obviously critical to our AEC clients, especially with massive projects that involve multiple firms. We certainly can’t guarantee that a new skyscraper or bridge will be built on time and on budget, but we can see to it that file data isn’t a problem.
A Principled Company
Finally, we strive to be a principled, trustworthy organization. But don’t take that from me. Read about our award-winning customer success team or take a minute to scan the many peer reviews on Gartner or G2.
When you work with Nasuni, you will not only be depending on a world-class unified file data platform, but a world-class organization that refuses to stoop to misinformation when competing for business. Nasuni integrates storage and data services through a flexible cloud operating model for unmatched IT efficiency, resilience, and cost savings. We prefer to let our incredible people and superior technology win each deal instead. And you can keep your socks on.
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