We compared Prisma SD-WAN and Prisma Access across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Prisma SD-WAN provides deep application visibility, centralized control, and the option to utilize local breakouts for internet connections. Prisma Access stands out for its ease of use, advanced security features, and global performance.
Room for Improvement: Prisma SD-WAN has room for improvement in various areas such as routing behavior, alerts and monitoring, and event analysis. Prisma Access could benefit from enhancements in error handling, latency, and integration with other cloud architectures.
Ease of Deployment: Some users experienced issues with existing traffic paths while setting up Prisma SD-WAN, which required several hours or more to resolve. Similarly, the setup process for Prisma Access varied in complexity and duration based on the size and requirements of the organization. While some users found it straightforward, others mentioned the need for expertise and assistance.
Service and Support: The feedback about Prisma SD-WAN's customer service varies. Some customers appreciated the support team's expertise, while others have noticed a decrease in the quality. Prisma Access's customer service has received mixed reviews. Some customers expressed a desire for better technical support, while others have had positive experiences with prompt responses and knowledgeable engineers.
Pricing: Prisma SD-WAN is less expensive than some solutions like Cisco, but Zscaler is even cheaper. Prisma Access is a more expensive solution, but users say the price is justified by its quality and features.
ROI: Prisma SD-WAN reduces costs and downtime while helping customers meet audit requirements. Prisma Access excels in identifying security concerns, seamlessly integrating with various products, and delivering instant value.
Comparison Results: Prisma SD-WAN offers useful features like in-depth application visibility, centralized control, and flexibility in WAN management. It has room for improvement in terms of routing behavior, documentation, and device reliability. Prisma Access is praised for its strong security features and ease of administration. It faces challenges with its user interface, configuration, and geographic coverage. Prisma SD-WAN is considered more affordable than other solutions, while Prisma Access is seen as higher-priced but justifiable for its quality.
"The protection offered by the product is the most valuable feature. It detects vulnerabilities or traps on our users' phones and then prompts them to clean up their devices. Tools we used previously would only discover, which required us to gather information on the backend, so Lookout is a welcome upgrade."
"The solution is stable."
"On the outside, the main differentiation is because Lookout ingest. They have ingested basically all of the apps for the last ten years and all the versions of all the apps, and we have that in a corporate database that allows us to do very large-scale machine learning and analysis on that data set. That's not something that any of the competitors really have the capability to do because they don't have access to the data set. A lot of the apps you can no longer get them because that version of the app is five or six years old, and it just doesn't exist anywhere anymore, except within our infrastructure. So, the ability to have that very rich dataset and learn from that dataset is a real differentiator."
"The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"Panorama provides centralized management capabilities for all our firewalls and locations so that we can manage different data centers through a single device, a very valuable feature. We don't have to log into various devices to oversee them individually."
"Overall, the cost savings, ease of deployment, and better VPN user experience and performance are valuable."
"I like it because it's very easy to use. You install the client and you have to know your gateway, but that's something we give to our users. Beyond that, it takes about three seconds to train them on how to use it. And it just works well. That's great for us because it means less administrative time."
"The solution has all its capabilities in a single cloud delivery platform which is great and it provides overall good protection."
"We're now able to go after contracts that require a Zero Trust solution and Prisma's other technology solutions."
"The users can securely access any cloud data centers or cloud platforms. In terms of the features, it has all the features that Palo Alto Next-Generation Firewall has. It is also very stable and scalable."
"The most valuable feature is the zero-trust part of this solution."
"You have the ability to create your own expressions for your data. Palo Alto understands that DLP is not the same for all consumers. You might have a particular need to fulfill, and they give you the opportunity to create a custom expression to match the specific format that you have. For a confidential file property that you have in your files, you can add a metadata field. It gives you that opportunity to create that."
"Prisma's analytics provide a lot of valuable data. I like the internet health chart that shows latency, dropped packets, MOS for data quality, etc. It also runs a continuous speed test in the background. I've used it multiple times to troubleshoot internet connections when the service provider has attempted to claim nothing is wrong with the circuit. It gives me data to send them showing we're not getting the speed we should, or there is constant packet loss."
"The gateway is available on the cloud which allows you access from anywhere and still connects to your home gateway."
"I like that the integration with Palo Alto is easy."
"The security offered by the solution is pretty good."
"It is flexible to use the internet connection via local breakouts without going to data centers."
"I like the link monitoring and analytics. These are the features that set Prisma apart from other products. Prisma works well with large, complex networks. One of my clients is a top bank in the United States, and Prisma has performed well for that customer."
"If the MPLS goes down, there is a really smooth transition for a branch site to take traffic over the Internet. It will advertise the routes of that site in a jiffy."
"When it comes to supporting large, complex, network architectures, it's a very simple architecture. The main component is the fabric. It's very easy to troubleshoot if there is an issue happening in the underlying network."
"We just submitted an enhancement request reflecting the main area we want to see improvement in; the APIs. Currently, we're able to build dashboards, but it's somewhat backward because we use our MDM API to create them. Lookout should provide API to customers so we can query our data and use it in our cloud, and this is the only outstanding area for improvement with the product right now."
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"The stability depends on the service from where you access it. Because sometimes, the place you are in, you have Gateway. You don't have Gateway. The gateway is overutilized. At the end, you need to go through their gateways. And this is the key point here. You have a tracking point. If it's not well orchestrated, and it scales up as you add more to the existing team, you will suffer"
"From the analysis that we've done, they do seem to be maybe a step behind in trying to enter the market with a new solution. But when they do pick up, they do come out with some good products."
"We've run into some challenges, having hit a lot of bugs over the past year in the deployment of GlobalProtect. We've had our fair share of issues that I haven't been happy with. We're working with the support organization to remediate them and waiting for updated releases. The response on getting the bugs fixed has not been what I would consider adequate for a product like this."
"The solution’s stability could be improved."
"While Palo Alto has understood the essence of building capabilities around cloud technology and have come up with a CASB offering, that is a very new product. There are other companies that have better offerings for understanding cloud applications and have more graceful controls. That's something that Palo Alto needs to work on."
"Prisma would be a stronger solution if it could aggregate resources by project or by application. So say we have an application we've developed in AWS and five applications we've developed in Azure. The platform will group it according to those applications, but it's based on the tags we use in Azure, which means I have to rely on development teams to tag resources properly."
"We are using the SaaS offering. We use our applications for microservices. We use Twistlock to scan containers, and it displays these results in Prisma, which is a good feature because we can see vulnerabilities with respect to these containers. We can see everything in a very detailed manner. However, when you have different environments for a single application, such as DEV, QA, PROD, and TEST, all these environments run multiple containers, which can lead to a very high number of containers. In such a scenario, it shows you the alerts for all those containers that have vulnerabilities. If you show the results of all the containers that share the same image, it is not going to add any value. Therefore, they should narrow down the alerts based on a container. It should show information for a single container. Otherwise, the person who is looking at the results gets the impression that he has to fix all these issues. This is something that they can improve."
"It is a managed firewall. When you run into issues and have to troubleshoot, there is a fair amount of restriction. You run into a couple of restrictions where you don't have any visibility on what is happening on the Palo Alto managed infrastructure, and you need to get on a call to get technical assistance from Palo Alto's technical support. You have to get them to work with you to fix the problem. I would definitely like them to work on the visibility into what happens inside Palo Alto's infrastructure. It is not about getting our hands onto their infrastructure to do troubleshooting or fixing problems; it is just about getting more visibility. This will help us in guiding technical support folks to the area where they need to work."
"The user interface could be better. They need to work a little bit on the console. It is similar to their firewalls but not exactly. They need to clean it up a bit."
"It applies commits to the firewalls slowly. There isn't an API you can use for anything. We've previously had trouble with the egress IP addresses though we expressed to engineering that those mustn't change. They changed several times without warning, causing a lot of headaches."
"There are two parallel things that we want Palo Alto to work on. First, customers want a unified appliance that does the work of all firewalls in addition to SD-WAN. Second, the cloud presence should be completely automated. If I purchase the SASE architecture, I shouldn't worry about deployments in Prisma Access or on Prisma SD-WAN. It should be deployed in one go."
"Prisma SD-WAN's technical support should be improved."
"Event correlation and analysis capabilities do not help minimize the number of alarms from a single event. That is the problem. We are getting a lot of incidents, and there is some issue with the correlation. That is still a drawback."
"Prisma could be a little cheaper."
"Sometimes, during the product's initial setup phase, bypass pair or couple ports don't come up normally, and it requires an hour and a half to troubleshoot to reset the box from Prisma SD-WAN to factory default."
"We are incorporating their zone-based firewalls. Prisma SD-WAN has limited documentation on how it manipulates traffic, e.g., how it is interacting with TCP and UDP. We recently had some traffic that was black holing. We literally had to do packet captures to see that the new zone-based firewall, which runs on top of Prisma SD-WAN, was causing issues."
"I would also like to see improvement in the product training for customers. Palo Alto has not initiated very much training but they have to do so because this is a new product. If you have experience in a legacy environment, and you are moving to Prisma SD-WAN, you don't have a training framework. That is one of the disadvantages."
"Customer support is our biggest pain point. The quality of support has gone down a little since we initially deployed this product. I don't know if this is due to turnover at Palo Alto or a lack of training. It is now taking one or two days to get an initial response that says, "Hey, we've looked into this, can you pull this data for us?" In the past, we'd immediately get a response."
More Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks Pricing and Cost Advice →
Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 1st in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with 58 reviews while Prisma SD-WAN is ranked 10th in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with 12 reviews. Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.2, while Prisma SD-WAN is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks writes "Integration with Palo Alto platforms such as Cortex Data Lake and Autofocus gives us visibility into our attack surface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prisma SD-WAN writes "A stable tool that offers a good uptime and ensures a return on investment". Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, Netskope , Cisco Umbrella, Zscaler Internet Access and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, whereas Prisma SD-WAN is most compared with Cisco SD-WAN, Meraki SD-WAN, Fortinet FortiGate, Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform and VMware SD-WAN. See our Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks vs. Prisma SD-WAN report.
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We monitor all Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
