Feature sets of all the recent backup and restore systems are becoming more and more alike, but when we started working on PGHoard there were no good options that were built to efficiently utilize different cloud object stores (S3 + GCS, Azure, Swift, etc.)

Our original announcement of PGHoard at https://aiven.io/blog/postgresql-cloud-backups-with-pghoard/ lists some of the reasons we had for building a new system from scratch.

Nowadays there are many good options for handling basebackups and WAL, and one of the largest remaining issues is the lack of parallel WAL apply in PostgreSQL itself, which limits restore throughput quite severely.