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Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 25, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (1st), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (9th), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (4th), Microsegmentation Software (2nd)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (6th), Container Security (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (1st), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is designed for Microsegmentation Software and holds a mindshare of 27.4%, up 23.0% compared to last year.
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP), holds 17.4% mindshare, down 20.8% since last year.
Microsegmentation Software
Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
 

Featured Reviews

KlavsThaarup - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers micro segmentation capabilities and easy to setup
It's micro-segmentation The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature. There are always areas for improvement. It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud. So that could be improved. In future releases, I would like to see more integration with other…
Mohammad Qaw - PeerSpot reviewer
It gives you one console to see all of your assets, review their configurations, and build your processes
Most customers use Prisma Cloud for visibility and compliance. Prisma has so many features, but many organizations do not use them. They primarily use the visibility part to connect all their cloud accounts and hosts for visibility to see if they are missing any security controls or if they have any misconfigurations. You can connect it to cloud environments such as Azure, AWS, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba, etc., or to an on-prem data center. Prisma Cloud gives you so many options to automate processes related to your daily operations. When it comes to cybersecurity, you can automate things with their existing APIs. They also have out-of-the-box integrations with many solutions. I have not seen any limitations. Everything is customizable. You can do whatever you want, defining the reporting and custom use cases. They recently updated the UI, so it's much better than before.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"That is primarily because I've seen increased rules. It's kind of caught us a little off guard. With GuardiCore, I have had to deal with their technical support and engineering team in Israel. They are amazing. They are very quick to adapt."
"The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature."
"I found the solution to be stable."
"Application Ring-Fencing and Deception Server, which is basically like a honeypot, are pretty useful features."
"Guardicore makes its own rule set automatically, so we can work fast when creating a rule set."
"The solution is very scalable, especially when connected to the cloud resources."
"From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful."
"This tool greatly helps in understanding the footprint of the attacks."
"The ability to monitor the artifact repository is one of the most valuable features because we have a disparate set of development processes, but everything tends to land in a common set of artifact repositories. The solution gives us a single point where we can apply security control for monitoring. That's really helpful."
"You can also integrate with Amazon Managed Services. You can also get a snapshot in time, whether that's over a 24-hour period, seven days, or a month, to determine what the estate might look like at a certain point in time and generate reports from that for vulnerability management forums."
"Prisma Cloud offers robust runtime scanning capabilities, which is beneficial for security teams."
"The runtime mechanism on the solution is very useful. It's got very good network mapping between containers. If you have more than one container, you can create a content data link between them."
"It provides insights into potential vulnerabilities in our code, helping us identify and rectify issues before they can be exploited."
"CSPM is the most valuable feature."
"The CVEs are valuable because we used to have a tool to scan CVEs, at the language level, for the dependencies that our developers had. What is good about Prisma Cloud is that the CVEs are not only from the software layer, but from all layers: the language, the base image, and you also have CVEs from the host. It covers the full base of security."
"Prisma Cloud's monitoring features such as the compute compliance dashboard and the vulnerability dashboard, where we can get a clear visualization of their docker, have also been valuable. We can get layer-by-layer information that helps us see exactly where it's noncompliant. They update the dashboards quite frequently."
 

Cons

"Customers would want to see the cost improved."
"The long-term management of the security policies could be improved with some kind of automation platform, something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, to help you manage the policies after day-one... to then manage the policies and changes to those policies, going forward, through some type of automation process is not turning out to be really easy."
"It would be very helpful for beginners if the solution had more windows to help with the terms inside instead of going to the documentation."
"Guardicore Centra should incorporate automation so that we don't require to write custom scripts and APIs. The tool also has limitations on rules where it allows only sixty thousand rules. Our clients have also commented that there are too many manual clicks and effort to do changes. I think that the incorporation of automation can help our clients make changes with confidence and without the possibility of human error."
"I would rate the stability a six out of ten, where one is low and ten is high stability."
"Clients would like to see that the security policies of GuardiCore can continue to be comparable to all the major firewall players out there."
"The dashboard needs improvement. It should be more flexible so that I can easily see what I want or need to see."
"Incident tagging could be improved. Other vendors offer semi-automatic tagging, which Guardicore doesn't yet have."
"The UI is the worst."
"It's not really on par with, or catering to, what other products are looking at in terms of SAST and DAST capabilities. For those, you'd probably go to the market and look at something like Veracode or WhiteHat."
"It provides all the cloud details but is not entirely linked to the compute model."
"The tool's UI is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"We face some GUI issues related to new permissions for AWS. So far, we don't have any automation to complete them through the GUI. We have to manually update the permissions. Our customers have faced some issues with that."
"When it comes to protecting the full cloud-native stack, it has the right breadth. They're covering all the topics I would care about, like container, cloud configuration, and serverless. There's one gap. There could be a better set of features around identity management—native AWS—IAM roles, and service account management. The depth in each of those areas varies a little bit. While they may have the breadth, I think there's still work to do in flushing out each of those feature sets."
"It can be too expensive for small companies."
"It does not provide runtime security or protection for Windows Server. It is currently lacking in terms of Windows environment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."
"The solution is reasonably priced and I would rate it a six out of ten. The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."
"The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."
"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."
"The customer would complain about the cost."
"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."
"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."
"The pricing structure is easy to understand. Depending on the use case the pricing of the solution can be different. There are not any additional costs to the standard living fees."
"We are encountering some resistance in the African market regarding the cost of Prisma Cloud."
"The price for Prisma Cloud is reasonable."
"The price is high. In the future, when there are more competitors at the same level with different clouds, maybe the position will be different."
"Prisma Cloud's licensing system functions as expected with a solid licensing infrastructure."
"Prisma Cloud is cost-efficient, but the credits are on the higher end."
"You can expect a premium price because it is a premium quality product by a leading supplier."
"The pricing and the licensing are both very fair... The biggest advice I would give in terms of costs would be to try to understand what the growth is going to look like. That's really been our biggest struggle, that we don't have an idea of what our future growth is going to be on the platform. We go from X number of licenses to Y number of licenses without a plan on how we're going to get from A to B, and a lot of that comes as a bit of a surprise. It can make budgeting a real challenge for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
6%
Educational Organization
17%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Guardicore Centra?
I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. I know other micro-segmentation tools like Cisco or Illumio, and so I think they are in the middle.
What do you like most about Guardicore Infection Monkey?
Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see mi...
What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?
When we have more than one interface, we can only have one policy for both interfaces. Normally, you have assets with a production interface and a server interface that are only for management. But...
What is your primary use case for Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks ?
Prisma Cloud helps support DevSecOps methodologies, making those responsibilities easier to manage.
What Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform do you recommend?
We like Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, since it offers us incredible visibility into our entire cloud system. We are able to easily see where our container vulnerabilities lie and and where cl...
What do you think of Aqua Security vs Prisma Cloud?
Aqua Security is easy to use and very manageable. Its main focus is on Kubernetes and Docker. Security is a very valuable feature and their speed of integration is very good. The initial setup was ...
 

Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore
Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE
Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.