SimpleBackups alternatives: managed services and open source tools

Seven SimpleBackups alternatives and their entry prices

The main SimpleBackups alternatives are SnapShooter and Ottomatik among managed services, AWS Backup for AWS-only stacks, and the open source tools pgBackRest, Databasus, BackupSheep and restic. Each row below was read on that product's own site on 3 October 2026. For reference, SimpleBackups Lite is $49 per month on monthly billing, or $39 per month on yearly billing, with 5 backup jobs.

Managed services: SnapShooter and Ottomatik

SnapShooter covers the same ground as SimpleBackups: databases, files, servers and applications, with its own storage or yours. DigitalOcean acquired it in January 2023 and the site footer now carries DigitalOcean's name. With yearly billing selected, its pricing page displays Lite at $13, Startup at $33 and Business at $66 per month, which the page labels as 34% off. The monthly-billing figure was unclear on the vendor's page when read, so it is not quoted here. The full breakdown is in SimpleBackups vs SnapShooter.

Ottomatik lists three plans: Lite at $14 per month with 3 jobs, daily backups and 5 GB of storage, Professional at $79 with 50 jobs and backups every 5 minutes, and Agency at $199 with 250 jobs. Its FAQ describes a 14-day free trial and restoring a database to the same or a different server in one click. Supported destinations are its hosted storage, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Backblaze and Dropbox. No yearly prices appear on the page.

AWS Backup for teams that run everything on AWS

AWS Backup has no subscription. You pay for backup storage, restores, cross-Region transfer and audit evaluations. It protects AWS resources such as RDS, Aurora, EBS, EC2, EFS, S3 and DynamoDB, and offers continuous backup with point-in-time restore for RDS going back up to 35 days. It will not reach a database at another host. SimpleBackups vs AWS Backup covers the per-GB math.

Open source tools: pgBackRest, Databasus, BackupSheep, restic

These cost nothing in license fees and move the work to you.

• pgBackRest takes full, differential and incremental PostgreSQL backups, archives WAL, and restores to a chosen time. Repositories can sit in S3, Azure or GCS compatible storage.
• Databasus is a self-hosted PostgreSQL backup tool deployed with Docker. Its site lists scheduling, notifications, WAL-based point-in-time recovery and a restore verification feature that restores the latest backup into a throwaway container.
• BackupSheep, once a hosted service, is now an open source control plane installed with Docker Compose. It dumps PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB and schedules provider snapshots.
• restic backs up files with encryption and deduplication. It has no database awareness, so you run the dump first.

Managed versus scripted backups sets out what that work includes.

Where SimpleBackups fits and where it does not

SimpleBackups fits a team with databases spread across several hosts that wants scheduling, alerts and anomaly checks without running anything. It supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis, more than 30 storage destinations, and SaaS backups for GitHub, GitLab, Notion and Linear. It does not fit when you need PostgreSQL point-in-time recovery, because its PostgreSQL backups are pg_dump files, or when database restores must be automated, because its docs describe database restores as manual.

Which alternative to pick by buyer type

• Solo developer with one or two small databases: Ottomatik Lite at $14, or the free tier of SimpleBackups or SnapShooter.
• Team hosted on DigitalOcean: SnapShooter, for the native Droplet and volume snapshots.
• Team fully on AWS with RDS: AWS Backup, with continuous backup turned on.
• PostgreSQL team that needs recovery to the minute and has an engineer to own it: pgBackRest.
• Team that wants a free dashboard and will self-host: Databasus for PostgreSQL only, BackupSheep for mixed stacks.
• Mixed stack, several clouds, nobody to run tooling: SimpleBackups Plus.

Whatever you choose, prove it with a restore. The restore runbook gives the steps.