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Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 26, 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

Barracuda Web Application F...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
17th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
8th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
113
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Barracuda Web Application Firewall is 2.1%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is 1.7%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks1.7%
Barracuda Web Application Firewall2.1%
Other96.2%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Shahzad Abid - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Information Technology at College of Physicians & Surgeons Pakistan
Has protected our legacy applications effectively but has required constant manual filtering due to false positives
I assess the effectiveness of the machine learning-driven threat detection in Barracuda Web Application Firewall as sometimes behaving abnormally, often showing me false positive attacks, so I have to fix these attacks from time to time. From a stability point of view, I would definitely rate Barracuda Web Application Firewall a seven out of ten. There is definitely some room for improvement; nothing is perfect in the world. I am not satisfied with the technical support from Barracuda. I am somewhat disappointed with the technical support that I have received so far. Whenever I generate a ticket for my problem, it goes to the Indian support team, and they all the time start with the most junior team member, consuming all my precious time. At the end, I have to close that ticket without any satisfactory solution. I have complained that they should shift my support to any other region because I don't need Indian support; they are simply pathetic and not up to mark. To improve Barracuda Web Application Firewall, customers should be given ongoing training opportunities regarding the product and its features. I am not familiar with many features that are available, only using those which are necessary for my applications. I believe Barracuda must provide clearer product information or training sessions to make it more user-friendly, as sometimes its interface can be rigid and lacking in helpful resources or user tutorials about its features. For it to get closer to a ten, I think advanced reporting is missing because, as I mentioned earlier, there are many false positive events being recorded. Often, when I analyze these attacks, they turn out to be genuine customers or users interacting with my product, but Barracuda tags them as attackers. Reducing false positives must be a priority.
reviewer2776578 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Image scanning has supported consistent security practices during cloud deployment
On a scale of ten, we would say people are happy with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for the part we use. People are okay with it. We probably would give an eight. We don't give ten because if we don't use the other parts of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, it's because it was difficult to implement from an operational point of view. We could have deployed the runtime monitoring with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, but within our organization at our company, it was very difficult to find who would be the owner for the alerts. People have other tools and in the end, we don't use the full capabilities of a product that we pay for. It's partially related to the difficulty to integrate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks runtime in our company's support process. We don't use the real-time monitoring part of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks. We don't know about the automated remediation feature of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the simplicity of configuration."
"The installation is straightforward."
"The volumetric DDoS defense is very good because I had a problem with a lot of volumetric DDoS attacks on my servers. After using Barracuda, those attacks have stopped and all the traffic is going smoothly to my servers and the system is working really well."
"The updating and signature features are my primary use case for the solution. These features are beneficial to my organization."
"Has a good dashboard."
"The most valuable features are the client VPN and content filtering."
"We only need one subscription to be protected against both active DDoS and offline DDoS attacks."
"It allows us to scale out to multiple phase servers."
"I was looking for a vulnerability scanner and I was looking for one place in which I could find everything. This tool not only does vulnerability scanning, but it also gives me an asset management tool."
"Due to the maturity of most companies, security posture management is the most valuable feature."
"We found it to be easy and flexible. We could easily configure it for our needs, and we could spread the Prisma Cloud platform to 16 countries without encountering any kind of problem."
"The most valuable feature is that the rule set is managed and that it can be run on a regularly scheduled basis."
"Prisma scans things and shows all the vulnerabilities and packages that are vulnerable, and which layers, by default, have vulnerabilities. So developers can easily go into the package or a particular layer and make changes to their code. It's very transparent."
"I would rate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks ten out of ten."
"CSPM is very useful because it gives us good policies and violation alerts."
"The solution gives us a lot of visibility across all of our cloud solutions."
 

Cons

"There's potential for improvement in the platform's CMS integration."
"I faced an issue when Barracuda decided not to support Azure Stack Hub anymore, which was a significant issue as we had many customers using it on that platform."
"As most people are aware, the implementation is not easy."
"If you know nothing about networks, then you can't set it up."
"It would be better if their updates would be released annually."
"I think the main area for improvement in this product is learning it, as can be seen when comparing it to the F5 web application firewall. F5 has a very powerful learning phase when you start using your web application firewall against your site. Barracuda has something like this, but not with the same functionality from my point of view."
"The GUI needs to be improved because it sometimes hangs and needs to be restarted."
"The incident reporting needs to be improved."
"When an account is onboarded, if it is missing any permission, it should automatically be updated with the required permissions and policies."
"The IM security has room for improvement."
"One of the main backlogs in their development is in the area of integration. For example, we have ServiceNow in place for ticket management and Prisma Cloud is supposed to send closure emails for incidents. But from time to time, it fails to do so. We have several other mismatches between Prisma Cloud and ServiceNow."
"There should be some kind of automation, AI incorporation, and bot system. All these would add value."
"They can improve the integrations into the SDLC lifecycle."
"The cost of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is too high. I would also appreciate the addition of NLP to reduce the learning curve and make configuring queries more user-friendly."
"A better correlation between the multiple products Prisma Cloud contains would be crucial. It would reduce the time spent looking at reports and enable you to get all the actionable insights across products. I think that Palo Alto is working on it, but they need to work faster because it doesn't make sense to have all these products in a single pane of glass without any correlation between them."
"The feedback that we have given to the Palo Alto team is that the UI can be improved. When you press the "back" button on your browser from the Investigate tab, the query that you're working on just disappears. It won't keep the query on the "back" button."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In my opinion, the product is fairly priced."
"The solution is based on a licensing model and might be $360 for the hybrid version."
"Our licensing fees are paid annually and the cost is between €600 and €800 (approximately $665.00 to $885.00 USD)."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"For small companies, the price is very expensive because the WAF is an enterprise-level application, not intended for smaller businesses. In my opinion, the price is right for enterprise-level use."
"The pricing is less compared to other web applications."
"They only offer a yearly licensing plan."
"They have competitive pricing."
"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."
"Prisma Cloud is more expensive than Check Point CloudGuard."
"This solution is good for a company with at least 400 people that must be connected remotely. For smaller companies, it can be too expensive."
"The pricing is good. They gave us some good discounts right at the end of the year based on the value that it brings, visibility, and the ability to build in cloud, compliance, and security within one dashboard."
"The pricing of the solution is fair."
"Although the cost can be high, the value is worth the price tag."
"Prisma Cloud licensing works on credits."
"The cost depends on the pricing model. Compared to other solutions, the cost isn't that bad."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business36
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise56
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
It significantly improved our overall web security posture, addressing intrusions and enhancing control over web URLs in our environment.
What is your primary use case for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
I am not using the API protection feature right now because I don't host any APIs through Barracuda Web Application Firewall. I use a second procedure for API, which is point-to-point VPN connectiv...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Barracuda Web Application Firewall?
At the time I was acquiring Barracuda Web Application Firewall, I found it costly compared to other products. To overcome that price factor, I excluded some features or subscriptions to align with ...
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

No data available
Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Oracle, CBS, Pioneer, Hyundai, Publix, Barnes Noble, Calzedonia, Nordstrom, Samsung, Nascar
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 Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.