Afi.ai vs SnapShooter

Afi.ai is a cloud-native backup and recovery service for Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Kubernetes. It protects mailboxes, drives, shared drives, calendars and contacts as well as Teams and SharePoint data, and it was built from scratch as a SaaS product rather than adapted from on-premises backup software, which shows in its quick setup and modern interface.

Backups run automatically on a schedule, with unlimited storage and unlimited retention included in a per-user price. Restores can be granular (a single email, file or folder) or cover a full account at a chosen point in time. AI-driven monitoring flags unusual activity such as mass deletions or encryption patterns that suggest ransomware, and a multi-tenant console lets managed service providers run backups for many client organizations from one place. Kubernetes cluster backup is priced separately on a custom basis.

Afi fits IT teams and MSPs that want SaaS backup without managing storage or legacy agents, especially organizations on Google Workspace, where fewer strong options exist. It is a younger and less known vendor than Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, Backupify or Spanning, and it does not cover Salesforce or other SaaS apps, so companies that want one vendor for every cloud application may prefer broader suites such as Druva or Own. For pure Workspace and 365 protection, transparent pricing and fast restores are its strongest arguments.

SnapShooter is a backup service for servers, volumes, databases and files hosted on cloud and VPS providers. It was founded in the UK as a bootstrapped company and acquired by DigitalOcean in 2023, and it is popular with developers and small teams who run their own infrastructure rather than a fully managed platform.

The service connects to providers such as DigitalOcean, AWS, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode and UpCloud through their APIs to schedule provider-level snapshots of droplets, instances and volumes. For more portable backups, it runs jobs over SSH that dump MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Redis databases or archive files and directories, then uploads them to S3-compatible storage you control, such as Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi or DigitalOcean Spaces. Retention rules, schedules, notifications and one-click restores are configured in a web dashboard. Plans are inexpensive and priced by the number of jobs and resources, with a small free tier.

SnapShooter fits indie developers, agencies and SaaS founders running apps on VPS servers who want automated, offsite backups without writing scripts. It is not built for enterprise backup requirements such as compliance reporting or endpoint protection. Teams comfortable with the command line can achieve similar results for free with restic or BorgBackup, while SimpleBackups is the closest hosted competitor. Because the product now sits inside DigitalOcean, check its current plans and roadmap before adopting it for non-DigitalOcean infrastructure.