Keepit vs AvePoint for SaaS Backup in Australia (2026)

AvePoint and Keepit are the two SaaS backup vendors that Australian MSPs and IT teams bring up most often when they are looking beyond Veeam. Both are proper products with real customer bases, real support, and real Australian data residency. Neither is a checkbox feature inside a bigger platform.

The difference is in scope and architecture. AvePoint grew out of the Microsoft ecosystem and it shows — their M365 coverage goes deeper into niche workloads like Planner and Project Online, and the governance tooling (data classification, sensitivity labels, tenant migration) gives you more to work with if your primary concern is Microsoft data management. Keepit started as a backup company and stayed focused on that, but spread wider across SaaS platforms. As of April 2026, Keepit covers 15+ applications and adds connectors every few weeks through a proprietary DSL framework that lets them build new connectors faster than traditional development cycles.

This is the same argument that comes up in the Keepit vs Veeam Data Cloud comparison, and it applies here too. If Microsoft Azure has an outage, your M365 data and your AvePoint backups (in the default Azure-hosted configuration) are both affected. Keepit stores backup data on its own infrastructure in Equinix facilities, completely outside the hyperscaler ecosystem.

AvePoint does offer BYOS, which means you could point storage at AWS S3 or another provider. In practice, most Australian deployments we see land on Azure because it is the path of least resistance in a Microsoft-centric environment. If infrastructure independence is a compliance requirement for your organisation, ask specifically about the BYOS configuration and factor in the extra storage costs.

This is where the products diverge most. AvePoint covers 6 SaaS applications. Keepit covers 15+ as of April 2026, and that number has been climbing steadily — GitHub, DocuSign, BambooHR, and Miro were all added in 2025-2026.

For MSPs, this is a revenue question as much as a technical one. Each new workload Keepit adds is a new line item the MSP can sell without deploying another product, retraining staff, or managing a separate vendor relationship. When a customer starts using Jira and asks about backup, the MSP enables the connector in the same Keepit tenant, adds the user count, and invoices. No procurement cycle, no new contract.

AvePoint's answer is different: they go deeper into the Microsoft stack with governance and compliance features. If your customers are primarily asking for Microsoft data management rather than multi-platform backup, that depth has real value.

Both charge per user. The structural difference is what is included in that price.

Keepit's per-user fee includes unlimited retention and unlimited storage. There is no overage bill, no tiered storage pricing, no surprise at renewal. The total cost is predictable from day one.

AvePoint's pricing depends on configuration. With AvePoint-managed storage, storage capacity is part of the subscription but may have limits depending on the plan. With BYOS, you pay AvePoint for the software licence and your cloud provider for storage separately. For short retention windows on small tenants, AvePoint can be price-competitive. For long retention (3+ years) or large data volumes, the unbundled storage cost tends to push the total higher than Keepit's all-inclusive model.

Get specific quotes for your tenant size. Both vendors have Australian pricing available through CRS.

Credit where it is due — AvePoint is the better choice in a few scenarios:

• Microsoft-only environments where you want backup, migration, and governance from a single vendor. AvePoint's data classification and sensitivity labelling tools are genuinely useful if you are managing compliance across a large M365 tenant.
• Planner and Project Online — AvePoint covers these Microsoft workloads that Keepit does not.
• Tenant-to-tenant migration — AvePoint has mature migration tools for M365, which is a different product but sold by the same vendor. If you are mid-merger, that matters.
• Existing AvePoint customers — if you already use AvePoint for governance, adding backup from the same vendor simplifies procurement and support.

Keepit is the stronger choice when:

• You protect more than just Microsoft. The 15+ workload coverage (as of April 2026) means one product, one console, one vendor relationship for your entire SaaS estate. AvePoint cannot cover GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps, Zendesk, Okta, or Miro.
• Independence from Azure is a requirement. Regulatory, risk management, or just operational preference — Keepit gives you a backup copy that has nothing to do with the platform you are backing up.
• You want immutability built in, not configured. Keepit's blockchain-verified storage is immutable at the architecture level. AvePoint's immutability depends on how the underlying storage is configured.
• You are an MSP that wants a growing product catalogue. Every new Keepit connector is a new billable service with zero deployment overhead.
• Predictable pricing matters. No storage overages, no tiered retention pricing.