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Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 1, 2026

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

Cloudflare Web Application ...
Sponsored
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
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
114
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (2nd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (2nd)
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
30th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.8
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 4.5%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is 1.9%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is 1.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall4.5%
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks1.9%
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences)1.2%
Other92.4%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

DB
CTO at PlayNirvana
Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.
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.
reviewer2161107 - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Room for improvement with user interface while competitive pricing impresses
It is managed through Infrastructure as Code, so all configurations can be managed in the code itself, which is beneficial. Because it uses rules, it is easy to set up, and we have many different sites where the configurations are straightforward. Though the UI is not very interactive, which is a downside, we can manage many things. The UI is not very intuitive and could be better. However, we manage all the configurations through code, which is easy to maintain. It has extensive anomaly detection capabilities, so the traffic is classified into several categories where thresholds can be defined and customized based on false positives and false negatives. This is advantageous because you do not need to tweak it very often. Once you set it up, an audit once a quarter would suffice. Because The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is API-driven, we have integrations with the CI/CD pipeline through GitHub Actions, making it easy to integrate.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution protects our application, which runs on the HTTP protocol, from DDoS attacks."
"The initial setup process is simple."
"There is a huge signature repository"
"The product has improved our security posture by blocking bad actors."
"The security features are valuable. The particular feature we use is called OWASP."
"This is a good product; it's reliable and scales well."
"Very glad the WAF rulesets works out of box, and requires very little tuning or maintenance."
"It is configurable via API."
"It is a good solution. Each team should utilize it. Every good organization is now moving towards or trying to be provider agnostic, so if you are using multiple providers, you should at least give Prisma Cloud a try."
"The CWP module, runtime protection, and WAAS API are valuable."
"We are provided with a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications without having to manage and reconcile compliance reports."
"The Cloud Workload Protection module is a very strong solution. I like the Cloud Workload Protection part. It is something I have not used for the banking client, but I had a chance to try it out for roughly a month on actual deployment of another customer. That part was really robust. Cloud Workload Protection would be the main feature that I enjoy the most."
"We have standardized vendor process management, so we want to reduce multiple vendors. Prisma Cloud is part of Palo Alto. We use Palo Alto firewalls and other solutions. Prisma has many features that intelligently cover cloud security. One solution can cover runtime for EC2 systems, containers, and Fargate. We also have EKS/Kubernetes integration. So, whatever the cloud-native solution in Pfizer, we can use one solution to secure that."
"One of the most valuable features is the compliance of RedLock, which we are using for any issues with security. It flags them and that's the primary objective of that feature."
"From the CSPM perspective, RQL in Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is a feature where we can conduct any kind of investigation and create our own custom policies, which is really helpful because in the cloud, there are millions of assets and with RQL, we can drill down to as fine a level as per our requirement."
"Palo Alto enables us to know what security threats are happening in the background."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."
"Because The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is API-driven, we have integrations with the CI/CD pipeline through GitHub Actions, making it easy to integrate."
"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."
"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."
 

Cons

"We don't even use Cloudflare Bot Management because it's too expensive; you need to pay per request, and it's much cheaper to get one or two additional machines."
"The user interface is very simple and straightforward, but users need knowledge about DNS to accomplish tasks."
"Support can be challenging at times."
"Its stability could be better."
"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."
"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"
"I have experienced some difficulties with Cloudflare's support as a customer based in India."
"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."
"Palo Alto should work on ease-of-use and the user-friendliness to be more competitive with some competing products."
"While Prisma provides a lot of visibility, it also creates a ton of work. Most customers that implement Prisma Cloud have thousands of alerts that are urgent."
"While the documentation continually improves, it still has limitations compared to the extensive resources available for older products like hardware firewalls, which have been around for approximately 20 years."
"The Application Security dashboard was not as user-friendly as the Cloud Security dashboard."
"We identified two things that we felt would be great to have, but they are under NDA. So, I can't disclose them. Other than those two things, we identified a generic bug in the secret key management service on AWS that needs to be fixed. We reported it to them, and we want them to fix it."
"A couple of exporting functionalities should be more user-friendly because if I want to export something, I can get a lot of data visible to that particular CSV."
"Some module customization might be needed and certain features like adding custom labels are currently unavailable unless we have administrator access."
"I don't have any specific notes for improvement; however, if they could continue to focus more on giving users the ability to create custom policies and configurations, that would be ideal."
"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."
"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."
"The UI is not very intuitive and could be better."
"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."
"The solution is expensive."
"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."
"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."
"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."
"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."
"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"
"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."
"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."
"Prisma Cloud is more expensive than Check Point CloudGuard."
"It is fairly priced. However, its price can be better so that small banks or small organizations can afford it and adopt it to secure their environment and data."
"The product is very expensive, but the cost is a necessary evil; I don't know how we could have any kind of cloud presence without this type of monitoring. The pricing is calculated by module and resource usage. Ultimately, it saves us money in the amount of time we would spend uncovering what it uncovers, and we might not make the required discoveries without it anyway. Prisma offers incredible value, though I wish it were cheaper."
"If you pay for three years of Palo Alto, it's better. If you're planning on doing this, it's obviously not going to be for one year, so it's better if you go with a three-year license... The only challenge we have is with the public cloud vendor pricing. The biggest lesson I have learned is around the issues related to pricing for public cloud. So when you are doing your segmentation and design, it is extremely important that you work with someone who knows and understands what kinds of needs you will have in the future and how what you are doing will affect you in terms of costs."
"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."
"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."
"The cost depends on the pricing model. Compared to other solutions, the cost isn't that bad."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
"The product has an affordable cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Retailer
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise57
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...
What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?
We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...
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...
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 valu...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Signal Sciences?
The pricing is very competitive compared to other providers. The pricing is definitely a factor in our decision-makin...
What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?
We do use it, but the UI can be improved as we mostly work through the CI/CD. It provides support, but sometimes it i...
What is your primary use case for Signal Sciences?
The CDN is for caching and The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is for protecting the servers from ma...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF
Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk
Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus
Find out what your peers are saying about Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.