fitgap

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

Features
Ease of use
Ease of management
Quality of support
Affordability
Market presence
Take the quiz to check if Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and its alternatives fit your requirements.
Pricing from
Pay-as-you-go
Free Trial unavailable
Free version
User corporate size
Small
Medium
Large
User industry
  1. Arts, entertainment, and recreation
  2. Media and communications
  3. Accommodation and food services

What is Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage is an S3-compatible cloud object storage service designed for storing and retrieving unstructured data such as backups, archives, media assets, and application data. It targets IT teams, developers, and managed service providers that need API-driven storage with predictable pricing and support for common backup and sync tools. The service provides buckets, objects, lifecycle rules, and integrations via S3 and native APIs, and it can be paired with third-party backup software for backup and disaster recovery workflows.

pros

S3-compatible object storage

B2 provides an S3-compatible API in addition to its native API, which helps teams use existing tooling and libraries built around S3 semantics. This reduces integration effort for applications and backup products that already support S3 targets. It also supports common object storage constructs such as buckets, object versioning options, and lifecycle management features (availability varies by configuration).

Broad backup tool integrations

B2 is commonly used as a storage target for third-party backup, sync, and media workflow tools that support S3 or have direct integrations. This makes it practical for online backup and server backup scenarios without requiring a proprietary backup agent from the storage provider. For disaster recovery designs, it can serve as an offsite copy location when paired with software that manages scheduling, retention, and restores.

Transparent usage-based pricing model

B2 pricing is primarily based on stored data and data egress, which can be easier to model than tiered feature bundles for some organizations. This structure fits archive storage and long-term retention use cases where capacity planning is important. It also supports pay-as-you-go consumption without requiring customers to deploy or manage storage hardware.

cons

Not a full backup suite

B2 is a storage service rather than an end-to-end backup and recovery platform. Core backup functions such as policy orchestration, application-aware backups, immutable retention workflows, and granular restore experiences typically depend on third-party software. Organizations seeking a single-console backup product may need additional tooling and operational integration.

Egress and retrieval considerations

As with most cloud object storage services, costs and performance for large restores depend on network bandwidth and egress charges. Disaster recovery scenarios that involve frequent or large-scale data retrieval can become expensive or operationally complex. Teams should validate restore time objectives and total cost for expected recovery patterns.

Object storage access model

B2 is optimized for object access rather than block or file protocols, which can limit suitability for workloads expecting POSIX/NFS/SMB semantics without an additional gateway layer. Applications that require low-latency random I/O or traditional NAS behavior may need architectural changes. Storage management features are focused on object lifecycle and API operations rather than full enterprise storage stack capabilities.

Plan & Pricing

Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go (usage-based). Backblaze also offers capacity-based B2 Reserve bundles and a high-throughput B2 Overdrive option.

Free tier/trial: First 10 GB of account storage is free. Free egress up to 3× your average monthly stored data; uploads are not charged. No evidence of a time-limited free trial was found.

Example costs:

  • Storage – $0.005 per GB per month (equivalently shown as $6 per TB per month billed monthly based on byte-hours).
  • Download / Egress – Free up to 3× average monthly stored data; additional egress billed at $0.01 per GB.
  • Transactions / API calls – Class A: Free. Class B: first 2,500 calls free per day, then $0.004 per 10,000. Class C: first 2,500 calls free per day, then $0.004 per 1,000.
  • B2 Overdrive (high-throughput) – Starts at $15 per TB per month and includes unlimited free egress (multi-petabyte commitment required).
  • B2 Reserve (capacity bundles) – Bundles start at 20 TB (1–3 year terms available); all-inclusive pricing (storage, egress, transactions) is sold via sales/resellers — contact sales for exact pricing.

Discount options / notes: Volume and term commitments available; unlimited free egress possible when using specific CDN/compute partners; B2 Reserve provides predictable all-inclusive pricing for capacity bundles.

Billing cadence / minimums: Pay-as-you-go billed monthly based on byte-hours. No minimum file size or minimum storage duration fees stated on official site.

(Details sourced only from Backblaze official site pages: B2 pricing pages, transaction-pricing, and B2 Reserve pages.)

Seller details

Backblaze, Inc.
San Mateo, California, USA
2007
Public
https://www.backblaze.com/
https://x.com/backblaze
https://www.linkedin.com/company/backblaze/

Tools by Backblaze, Inc.

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
Backblaze Computer Backup

Popular categories

All categories