Prisma Cloud is praised for its competitive pricing, ease of deployment, comprehensive security capabilities, and top-notch customer service. On the other hand, F5 Advanced WAF receives mixed opinions on pricing, setup cost, and licensing, but is valued for its robust security features, customizable policies, and responsive customer support.
The summary above is based on 138 interviews we conducted recently with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and F5 Advanced WAF users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"F5 Advanced WAF secures our connectivity and combines both the main functions of WAF (balancing and web application security)."
"With F5 Advanced WAF, it was protection for online publications and for our customers that caused us to choose the platform."
"The anti-bot protection is the solution's most valuable feature. Safe-guard or credential staffing are also useful features."
"The most valuable features of the F5 Advanced WAF are the enhanced ASM and the performance. Additionally, the usability and effectiveness are very good."
"We can monitor IP locations, but we have constraints from each country. It has a replication feature. Licenses can be shared, taking turns with each license."
"It's scalable and very easy to manage."
"This solution inspects your traffic and based on that, automatically create distinct qualities for you, so you can add this to the policy already created. That's what I like most."
"In terms of F5 Advanced WAF's most valuable features, I would definitely say its stability. F5 is one the most stable products. Either as the load balancer or the web application firewall, it is very stable."
"The first aspect that is important is the fact that Prisma Cloud is cloud-agnostic. It's actually available for the five top cloud providers: AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, and Alibaba Cloud. The second aspect is the fact that we can write our own rules to try to detect misconfigurations in those environments."
"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."
"Palo Alto enables us to know what security threats are happening in the background."
"It provides good visibility and control regardless of the complexity."
"The most valuable features are the alerts and auto-remediation because it allows us a lot of flexibility to customize and do things the Palo Alto team never intended. We faced some challenges with certificates because we also have next-gen firewalls. We would like to equip all the traffic because there have been many cases in which the developers have done things by mistake. Deploying certificates on virtual machines can be complex in a development environment, but we managed to do that with Prisma Cloud."
"As a pure-play CSPM, it is pretty good. From the data exposure perspective, Prisma Cloud does a fairly good job. Purely from the perspective of reading the conflicts, it is able to highlight any data exposures that I might be having."
"The solution gives us a lot of visibility across all of our cloud solutions."
"I found the network queue sets useful. I also liked the Workload Protection Module, the vulnerability findings, and how the rule sets handle the vulnerabilities based on severity."
"It should be a little bit easy to deploy in terms of the overall deployment session. One of our customers is a bit unhappy about the reporting options. Currently, it automatically deletes event logs after some limit if a customer doesn't have any external Syslog server. It is a problem for those customers who want to review event logs after a week or so because they won't get proper reports or event logs. They should increase the duration to at least a month or two for storing the data on the device. F5 is not a leader in Gartner Quadrant, which affects us when we go and pitch this solution. Customers normally go and take a look at such annual reports, and because F5 is currently not there as a leader, the customers ask about it even though we are saying it is good in all things. F5 is not known for something totally different or unique. They were a major player in ADP, and they are just rebranding themselves into security. They should improve or increase their marketing as a security company now. They have already started to do that, but they should do it more so that when it comes to security, customers can easily remember F5. At the moment, if we say F5, load balancing comes to mind. With rebranding and marketing, all customers should get the idea that F5 is now mainly focusing on the security part of it, and it is a security company instead of load balancing. This is the first solution that should come to a customer's mind for a web application firewall."
"There is a learning curve that extends the time of implementation."
"For me, an area for improvement in F5 Advanced WAF is the reporting as it isn't so clear. The vendor needs to work on the reporting capability of the solution. What I'd like to see in the next release of F5 Advanced WAF is threat intelligence to protect your web application, particularly having that capability out-of-the-box, and not needing to pay extra for it, similar to what's offered in FortiWeb, for example, any request that originates from a malicious IP will be blocked automatically by FortiWeb. F5 Advanced WAF should have the intelligence for blocking malicious IPs, or automatically blocking threats included in the license, instead of making it an add-on feature that users have to pay for apart from the standard licensing fees."
"The BNS module needs improvement."
"It's sometimes difficult to customize APIs with F5 Advanced WAF."
"The reporting could be clearer and embedded to include our movement data."
"The BIG-IQ is supposed to centralize the management for all of the boxes but it's not very effective."
"You have to buy another module with an extra license, to have the authentication feature."
"While the code security feature has undergone recent enhancements, there is room for improvement in terms of its cost module."
"One definite area for improvement is the auto-remediation or the CWP area. The second one is the RQL language. It is still not very flexible and does not cover a lot of use cases. The RQL language could be dramatically improved to add more options."
"I would like Prisma Cloud to improve its mapping feature to increase usability."
"We would like it to have more features from the risk and compliance perspectives."
"The regional cost of Prisma Cloud in South Africa is high and could be improved."
"The Palo Alto support needs to improve."
"Sometimes we do get false alerts. That should be improved."
"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."
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F5 Advanced WAF is ranked 2nd in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 55 reviews while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 5th in Web Application Firewall (WAF) with 82 reviews. F5 Advanced WAF is rated 8.6, while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of F5 Advanced WAF writes "Flexible configuration, reliable, and highly professional support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks writes "The dashboard is very user-friendly and can be used to generate custom RQL based on user requirements". F5 Advanced WAF is most compared with Fortinet FortiWeb, Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, AWS WAF, Imperva Web Application Firewall and Azure Front Door, whereas Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Wiz, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Aqua Cloud Security Platform, AWS Security Hub and Qualys VMDR. See our F5 Advanced WAF vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report.
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