AWS GuardDuty vs Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Palo Alto Networks are both solutions in the Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.9, while Palo Alto Networks is ranked #13 with an average rating of 8.6. Additionally, 92% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Palo Alto Networks users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between AWS GuardDuty and Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS GuardDuty vs. Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty vs. Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

December 2025

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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

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...

Featured Reviews

Satyavijay Chavan

Information Security Engineer at DataVigilant Infotech

Enables us to prioritize and effectively address critical security issues

Evidence-based reporting helps us to prioritize and solve critical security issues. The new visualization feature demonstrates how an attacker can enter the system, highlighting the potential path that can be exploited and outlining all the steps the attacker could take. With that visibility, we can ensure the perimeter is strong and attackers cannot enter, thus reducing the risk. It has helped us prioritize issues. The visibility into how an attack could happen is valuable. For example, it highlights the system vulnerability and outlines where an attack could propagate. The visualization helps me to prioritize remediation, and if I don't know where to start, I can check to see the score that enables me to prioritize issues. I am using infrastructure-as-code scanning, and it's one of the useful features. In pre-production, it identifies embedded secrets and misconfigurations, including issues with Kubernetes or some privileged containers. This feature allows us to pass the audit and secure IaC code so that it isn't easily exploitable by attackers. We can more proactively work to identify and resolve vulnerabilities by using the dashboard and the alerting system that SentinelOne provides. It helps us with audits and compliance. We can show the compliance in percentage. We can confidently say that our company or infrastructure is very secure. It has improved our security posture by 30% to 35%. It has reduced our false positives by 30%. It has helped teams collaborate better. The security team manages SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, and when it flags vulnerabilities, they are forwarded to DevOps for remediation. Previously, we needed to identify and report the issues, but there would be lapses in communication. Now, there is a centralized dashboard that anyone can look at and see the open issues and work on them.

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ShantanuKhare

Senior IT Auditor at Ernst & Young

Has provided automated threat detection and daily malicious activity insights while supporting seamless orchestration with existing dashboards

I would assess the integration of AWS GuardDuty with Threat Intelligence as majorly positive; no threat intelligence is 100% accurate, and there are a few false positives, but as a security engineer, this must be accepted, and overall, the response and service is good for us. We do not directly use AWS GuardDuty dashboard by itself, as we have our own integrated security dashboard; AWS GuardDuty gives the feed to that dashboard, and it's giving us a satisfactory view of how the security landscape looks. We use metrics such as zero-day threats, any malicious traffic, and any traffic which originates from OFAC countries to measure its effectiveness, as we are majorly into a financial institution, as any traffic that is from a malicious IP or a rogue device. I don't see any significant negative points regarding AWS GuardDuty; it's a good product to have if you're a cloud consumer. I rate AWS GuardDuty nine out of ten overall.

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reviewer1980216

Business Development Manager For Palo Alto Networks at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Unified security platform has simplified multi-cloud protection and improved threat response

From the commercial perspective, we have some limitations because Palo Alto has a minimum number of users of endpoints set at 200, which is quite high for the Italian market. Additionally, there is not a clear MSP model compared to other vendors such as CrowdStrike. These are significant limitations, especially today when managed services are becoming increasingly important for end users. Palo Alto decided to limit some functionalities because they want to stress more on Cortex XSIAM. I do not agree with this strategy because Cortex XSIAM is a completely different market compared to Cortex XDR. This is the main issue of Cortex—the commercial model Palo Alto is implementing. The product is very good; the problem is the commercial model. There are probably some areas for improvement because Palo Alto is growing too much. Today the challenge is to have skilled people, which I believe is the same issue everywhere. I do not agree with this decision.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is scalable, stable, and can detect any threat on a machine. It uses artificial intelligence and can lock down any virus."

"We like the platform and its response time. We also like that its console is user-friendly as well as modern and sleek."

"We noted immediate benefits from using the solution."

"The real-time detection and response capabilities overall are great."

"Cloud Native Security's best feature is its ability to identify hard-coded secrets during pull request reviews."

"The UI is responsive and user-friendly."

"It's helped free up staff time so that they can work on other projects."

"Overall, I would rate SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security a ten out of ten."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"It is a highly scalable solution since it is a service by AWS. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"One of the advantages of cloud services is the ability to use them on demand. There's minimal installation involved; you can check the latest offerings and make new deployments while dismantling the previous ones. This approach keeps you ahead of potential services, showcasing the agility of AWS."

"Deployment is great, and we didn't face any big challenges."

"GuardDuty is extensive in terms of configuration and security compliance."

"Overall, GuardDuty is a very easy-to-use tool, and I would recommend it even to those who are not tech-savvy."

"What we found most valuable in Amazon GuardDuty is its threat detection feature, especially because we were monitoring a huge number of AWS accounts, so we needed a solution that would monitor for any kind of malicious activity. The monitoring aspect of the solution was great because it gave us timely notifications if and when anything happened, and Amazon GuardDuty helped keep us on our toes to make sure we took action right away."

"We have over 1,000 employees, and we monitor their activity through AWS GuardDuty."

"The way it monitors accounts is definitely a very important feature."

More AWS GuardDuty pros

"Overall, Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is a technically strong product, and I rate it ten out of ten."

"I have seen several benefits from using Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks: It was easy to use and easy to migrate from the IBM platform."

"I have absolutely seen improvements in our incident close rates, with mean time to detect and respond reduced significantly, sometimes by at least forty to fifty percent."

"Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks has impacted our organization positively by keeping our machines secure and our team using the dashboard to find issues quickly."

"The most beneficial aspect of Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and Palo Alto in general is that there is a single platform for all cloud providers for securitization."

"The AI and automation features in detecting and responding to high-risk threats are impressive; it's one of the best tools regarding AI technology and unifies security in one platform in real-time, improving vulnerability analysis, incident response, and compliance reporting."

"From a technical standpoint or pricing, Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is a stronger solution in the market at the moment compared to other products from ConnectWise or Symantec."

Cons

"Scanning capabilities should be added for the dark web."

"We are experiencing problems with Cloud Native Security reporting."

"We wanted it to provide us with something like Claroty Hub in AWS for lateral movement. For example, if an EC2 instance or a virtual machine is compromised in a public subnet based on a particular vulnerability, such as Log4j, we want it to not be able to reach some of our databases. This kind of feature is not supported in SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security."

"One of the issues with the product stems from the fact that it clubs different resources under one ticket."

"The Automation tab is an add-on that doesn’t work properly. They provide a list of scripts that don’t work and I have asked support to assist but they won’t help. When running on various endpoints the script doesn’t work and if it does, it’s only a couple. There are a lot of useful scripts that would be beneficial to run forensics, event logs, and process lists running on the endpoint."

"In addition to the console alerts, I would like SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security to also send email notifications."

"The categorization of the results from the vulnerability assessment could be improved."

"The Infrastructure as Code service available in SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security and the services available in AWS cloud security can be merged so that we can get the security data directly from AWS cloud in SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security. This way, all the data related to security will be in one single place. Currently, we have to check a couple of things on SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, and we have to validate that same data on the AWS Cloud to be sure. If they can collaborate like that, it will be great."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"Because it's a threat detection service, they need to keep up with the various threat factors because new threat factors and attack factors come up all the time."

"The solution has to be integrated with new services that AWS adds like QuickSight, Managed Airflow, AppFlow and MWAA."

"We currently find Lacework to be much better at detecting vulnerabilities than AWS GuardDuty. The engines of AWS GuardDuty have to be improved."

"GuardDuty is limited to AWS environments."

"For the next release, they could provide IPS features as well."

"Amazon GuardDuty could be better enriched in threat intelligence data."

"The product needs to improve its cost-efficiency since it is expensive."

"I think that some detections in container environments such as container runtime, and on services such as AWS container service, Fargate service or EKS service could be improved."

More AWS GuardDuty cons

"Some aspects of the GUI can be confusing and make it difficult for me to find certain options or navigate where needed."

"The pricing is high, making ROI challenging to justify, especially during transitions between solutions."

"The negative aspects or areas for improvement in the product include the fact that the cost might be a bit high, which challenges commercials, but not technically."

"Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is creating some confusion in terms of names because this is recent."

"From the commercial perspective, we have some limitations because Palo Alto has a minimum number of users of endpoints set at 200, which is quite high for the Italian market."

"Overall, I rate Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks as an eight out of ten. I think that it could improve on price, as I know that the Google solution has the best price, and this is one of the conditions."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is somewhat high compared to other market tools."

"PingSafe falls within the typical price range for cloud security platforms."

"I am not involved in the pricing, but it is cost-effective."

"PingSafe is not very expensive compared to Prisma Cloud, but it's also not that cheap. However, because of its features, it makes sense to us as a company. It's fairly priced."

"Its pricing is constant. It has been constant over the previous year, so I am happy with it. However, price distribution can be better explained. That is the only area I am worried about. Otherwise, the pricing is very reasonable."

"SentinelOne provided competitive pricing compared to other vendors, and we are satisfied with the deal."

"While I'm slightly out of touch with pricing, I know SentinelOne is much cheaper than other products."

"SentinelOne offers excellent pricing and licensing options."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"The platform is inexpensive."

"It can get very expensive. If you turn on every feature, it can turn into hundreds of thousands of dollars."

"GuardDuty only enables accounts in regions where you have an active workload. If there are places where you don't have an active workload, you wouldn't even enable them. That's one area where they could allow you to cut down your cost."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price, I rate the pricing a four or five, which is somewhere in the middle."

"We use a pay-as-you-use license, which is competitively priced in the market."

"The pricing model is pay as you go and is based on the number of events per month."

"80 percent of the customers are using AWS GuardDuty, and we recommend it due to its low cost, especially for small customers, ranging from five to ten dollars a month. In our policies, we enforce the usage of this service, making it a recommended practice for security."

"I don't have all the details in terms of licensing for Amazon GuardDuty, but my organization does have a license set up for it."

More AWS GuardDuty pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Performing Arts

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	48
Midsize Enterprise	22
Large Enterprise	54

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	15

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	2

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PingSafe?

The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best featu...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

Regarding the pricing for SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, I do not think it is something I can compare.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

Regarding the downsides of cloud security, I do not have much negative to discuss about cloud security, because it is...

See all answers

What do you like most about Amazon GuardDuty?

With anomaly detection, active threat monitoring, and set correlation, GuardDuty alerts me to any unusual user behavi...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon GuardDuty?

AWS GuardDuty is an expensive feature, and while you can't expect the price to be low, it can be lower because it's p...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon GuardDuty?

AWS GuardDuty is a good product; it's doing its job right now, and I don't see any additional improvements needed. Co...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks?

The solution is costly, with high-end capabilities suitable for enterprises. It is less affordable for startups or sm...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks?

Regarding areas for improvement, the tool performs its functions well, but frequent name changes across Palo Alto Net...

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What is your primary use case for Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks?

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks serves as our primary tool for understanding our assets and performing API integra...

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Comparisons

Wiz vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 10% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 6% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

Rapid7 Metasploit vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 2% of the time

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Competitors

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 69% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 6% of the time

Wiz vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 5% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 4% of the time

Upwind vs AWS GuardDuty

Compared 1% of the time

More AWS GuardDuty Competitors

Wiz vs Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 18% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 8% of the time

WithSecure Elements Exposure Management (XM) vs Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes vs Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 4% of the time

More Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

January 2026

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty

February 2026

Download AWS GuardDuty product report

Buyer's Guide

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

February 2026

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report

Download Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

No data available

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers a streamlined approach to cloud security with intuitive operation and strong integration capabilities for heightened threat detection and remediation efficiency.

Singularity Cloud Security stands out for its real-time detection and response, effectively minimizing detection and remediation timelines. Its automated remediation integrates smoothly with third-party tools enhancing operational efficiency. The comprehensive console ensures visibility and support for forensic investigations. Seamless platform integration and robust support for innovation are notable advantages. Areas for development include improved search functionality, affordability, better firewall capabilities for remote users, stable agents, comprehensive reporting, and efficient third-party integrations. Clarity in the interface, responsive support, and real-time alerting need enhancement, with a call for more automation and customization. Better scalability and cost-effective integration without compromising capabilities are desired.

What are SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security's standout features?

Ease of Use: Intuitive operation simplifies navigation across platforms.
Real-Time Detection: Quick identification and response to threats.
Automated Remediation: Streamlines recovery processes with integration capabilities.
Forensic Visibility: Aids in thorough threat analysis and prevention strategies.
Comprehensive Console: Offers full visibility and historical data tracking.
Platform Integration: Supports seamless operation across cloud and hybrid environments.

What benefits should users expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Efficiency: Automation and third-party integration improve threat response.
Improved Detection: Reduces mean time to detect and respond to threats.
Operational Support: Comprehensive visibility and forensic tools aid operational decisions.
Cost Efficiency: Affordable integration with scaling capabilities without high overhead.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is deployed in industries needing robust cloud security posture management, endpoint protection, and threat hunting. Utilized frequently across AWS and Azure, it assists in monitoring, threat detection, and maintaining compliance in diverse environments while providing real-time alerts and recommendations for proactive threat management.

SentinelOne

Amazon Guard Duty is a continuous cloud security monitoring service that consistently monitors and administers several data sources. These include AWS CloudTrail data events for EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) audit logs, VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) flow logs, DNS (Domain Name System) logs, S3 (Simple Cloud Storage), and AWS CloudTrail event logs.

Amazon GuardDuty intuitively uses threat intelligence data - such as lists of malicious domains and IP addresses - and ML (machine learning) to quickly discover suspicious and problematic activity in a user's AWS ecosystem. Activities may include concerns such as interactions with malicious IP addresses or domains, exposed credentials usage, or changes and/or escalation of privileges.

GuardDuty is able to easily determine problematic AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances delivering malware or mining bitcoin. It is also able to trace AWS account access history for evidence of destabilization. such as suspicious API calls resulting in changing password policies to minimize password strength or anomalous infrastructure deployments in new or different never-used regions.

GuardDuty will continually alert users regarding their AWS environment status and will send the security discoveries to the GuardDuty dashboard or Amazon CloudWatch events for users to view.

Users can access GuardDuty via:

AWS SDKs: Amazon provides users with several software development kits (SDKs) that are made up of libraries and sample code of numerous popular programming languages and platforms, such as Android, iOS, Java, .Net, Python, and Ruby. The SDKs make it easier to develop programmatic access to GuardDuty.
GuardDuty HTTPS API: This allows users to issue HTTPS requests directly to the service.
GuardDuty Console: This is a browser-based intuitive dashboard interface where users can access and use GuardDuty.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

Kubernetes protection is an optional add-on in Amazon GuardDuty. This tool is able to discover malicious behavior and possible destabilization of an organization's Kubernetes clusters inside of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

When Amazon EKS is activated, GuardDuty will actively use various data sources to discover potential risks against Kubernetes API. When Kubernetes protection is enabled, GuardDuty uses optional data sources to detect threats against Kubernetes API.

Kubernetes audit logs are a Kubernetes feature that captures historical API activity from applications, the control plane, users, and endpoints. GuardDuty collates these logs from Amazon EKS to create Kubernetes discoveries for the organization's Amazon EKS assets; there is no need to store or turn on the logs.

As long as Kubernetes protection remains activated, GuardDuty will continuously dissect Kubernetes data sources from the Amazon EKS clusters to ensure no suspicious or anomalous behavior is taking place.

Amazon Simple Cloud Storage (S3) Protection

Amazon S3 allows Amazon GuardDuty to actively audit object-level API processes to discover possible security threats to data inside an organization's S3 buckets. GuardDuty continually audits risk to the organization’s S3 assets by carefully dissecting AWS CloudTrail management events and AWS CloudTrail S3 data events. These tools are continually auditing various CloudTrail management events for potential suspicious activities that affect S3 buckets, such as PutBucketReplication, DeleteBucket, ListBucket, and data events for S3 object-level API processes, such as PutObject, GetObject, ListObject, and DeleteObject.

Reviews from Real Users

“The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms. Prior to using GuardDuty, we had multiple systems to collect data and put it in a centralized location so we could look into it. Now we don't need to do that anymore as GuardDuty does it for us.” - Arunkumar A., Information Security Manager at Tata Consultancy Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks provides comprehensive cybersecurity management, focusing on enhancing security operations with advanced automation and threat intelligence, addressing complex security challenges efficiently.

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks integrates cloud-scale data analytics and automation to streamline security operations, enabling faster threat detection and response. It leverages AI and machine learning to provide real-time threat intelligence and automate routine tasks, reducing the burden on security teams. Users benefit from improved visibility across networks and greater operational efficiency, making it crucial for enterprises aiming to secure their digital assets against evolving cyber threats.

What are the key features of Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks?

Automated Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats in real-time using AI algorithms.
Advanced Analytics: Provides in-depth data insights for proactive threat prevention.
Incident Management: Streamlines incident response with automated workflows.
Scalable Architecture: Offers flexibility to grow with organizational needs.

What benefits or ROI should you expect from Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks reviews?

Increased Efficiency: Automation reduces manual efforts in threat management.
Enhanced Security Posture: Improved visibility leads to better threat preparedness.
Cost Savings: Minimizes expenses related to manual threat detection and response.
Scalability: Grows with the organization, reducing the need for constant upgrades.

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is favored in sectors like finance, healthcare, and telecommunications, where data security is paramount. Its ability to integrate with existing infrastructure and provide real-time insights makes it a preferred choice for securing sensitive information and ensuring compliance within industry regulations.

Palo Alto Networks

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

autodesk, mapbox, fico, webroot

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

AWS GuardDuty vs. Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

December 2025

Free Report: AWS GuardDuty vs. Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Find out what your peers are saying about AWS GuardDuty vs. Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.

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