Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs F5 Advanced WAF comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 19, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.4
Cortex Cloud provides effective automation, enhances security, reduces costs, and optimizes resources, offering significant value despite its cost.
Sentiment score
7.8
F5 Advanced WAF provides high ROI through security, compliance, scalability, and low overhead, justifying investment especially in finance.
It eliminates the need for additional hardware, making it a financially and technically sound investment.
It helped reduce risks and sped up threat detection.
From a security standpoint, we have significantly enhanced our client's security posture by implementing Prisma Cloud.
Subscription models offer clearer ROI due to a more competitive pricing scheme.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.1
Cortex Cloud provides prompt technical support, highly rated despite occasional delays, with integration offering added benefits.
Sentiment score
7.1
F5 Advanced WAF is praised for expertise and dedication, though response time improvements for initial queries are suggested.
Whenever I have issues with the solution, I will get an immediate response from the product team and they will try to close the issue as soon as possible.
When you send them a message, you get a response in a minute or two.
They can respond with technical documentation or pass on the case to the next level because it requires the development of a new feature or changing a feature due to a bug.
I have interacted with F5's support, and while I have no major complaints, they could improve.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Cortex Cloud ensures scalable integrations in cloud environments, praised for adaptability despite some module limitations and licensing constraints.
Sentiment score
7.6
F5 Advanced WAF scales efficiently, supports diverse environments, and suits medium to large enterprises with excellent load balancing.
It's very scalable and very easy to use.
It's the type of tool that is constantly improving, and its scalability suits our environment well.
If we want to scale, we only need to purchase another license.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Cortex Cloud offers strong stability and reliability, excelling in handling enterprise needs with minimal disruptions and swift incident resolution.
Sentiment score
8.5
F5 Advanced WAF is highly stable, efficiently handles high traffic, and receives top ratings for reliability and security.
I cannot recall any downtime with the solution.
I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.
I haven't seen any outages with Prisma Cloud.
 

Room For Improvement

Cortex Cloud needs better documentation, user interface, API integration, automation, and support for diverse cloud environments with seamless third-party integration.
F5 Advanced WAF requires intuitive UI, clearer reporting, seamless updates, better integration, and improved support with advanced features.
It is a SaaS solution, but some of my clients have a local regulatory requirement, and they want to install it locally on their premises.
From a developer's perspective, especially for organizations like banks developing their applications, ensuring API security before deploying them to the cloud is crucial.
Prisma Cloud is an excellent tool.
Deployment training for F5 Advanced WAF is lacking and restricts growth by being inaccessible and costly for partners.
 

Setup Cost

Cortex Cloud offers premium security features with complex licensing; valued for integration but perceived as expensive compared to competitors.
F5 Advanced WAF is costly but valued for robust features; pricing varies, challenging for small businesses yet negotiable.
A strategy to optimize costs will save you money.
The licensing model for data security should be compared to the native security offered by AWS and Azure.
Prisma Cloud is remarkably expensive.
Subscription models have competitive pricing, while perpetual licenses involve an upfront higher cost.
 

Valuable Features

Cortex Cloud excels in workload security with robust identity creation, AWS integration, and multi-cloud support for comprehensive protection.
F5 Advanced WAF enhances web security with anti-bot protection, behavior analysis, and flexible policy customization, featuring AI and load balancing.
Prisma offers visibility to developers and high-level leadership because the dashboard is excellent and the alerts are comprehensive.
Its ease of integration is valuable because we need to get the solution out of the door quickly, so speed and ease matter.
Security posture management is the most valuable feature.
The perpetual license, despite an initial higher cost, lacks transparency regarding support expiration.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto N...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
108
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (2nd), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (1st), Software Supply Chain Security (1st), Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) (1st), Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) (1st), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (2nd)
F5 Advanced WAF
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and F5 Advanced WAF aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is designed for Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) and holds a mindshare of 26.9%, down 27.7% compared to last year.
F5 Advanced WAF, on the other hand, focuses on Web Application Firewall (WAF), holds 11.3% mindshare, up 10.4% since last year.
Cloud Detection and Response (CDR)
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammad Qaw - PeerSpot reviewer
It gives you one console to see all of your assets, review their configurations, and build your processes
Most customers use Prisma Cloud for visibility and compliance. Prisma has so many features, but many organizations do not use them. They primarily use the visibility part to connect all their cloud accounts and hosts for visibility to see if they are missing any security controls or if they have any misconfigurations. You can connect it to cloud environments such as Azure, AWS, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba, etc., or to an on-prem data center. Prisma Cloud gives you so many options to automate processes related to your daily operations. When it comes to cybersecurity, you can automate things with their existing APIs. They also have out-of-the-box integrations with many solutions. I have not seen any limitations. Everything is customizable. You can do whatever you want, defining the reporting and custom use cases. They recently updated the UI, so it's much better than before.
Richard Polyak - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy event identification, highly stable, and customizable
Generally, F5 Advanced WAF initial setup is straightforward. However, our environment was more complex and it took us a little more time to customize the solution to where we needed it to be. Additionally, the customization didn't rectify everything. We had to do customization to a certain event to prevent attacks that it wasn't catching, but that might not necessarily be the solutions' fault. It could be more of our setup than the solution's fault and not being able to run the latest version or the newer version could be more of a limitation on our ability to put it in the right place. The whole implementation to have the solution run at the level we wanted it to take approximately five months. Our company's environment is one that we can't put a canned solution in front of. Our environment, cannot have a canned solution that might fit everybody else because of how customized this environment is. It does need a lot of tuning to meet our environment's requirements. I rate the initial setup of F5 Advanced WAF a three out of five.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) solutions are best for your needs.
841,004 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
17%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
What do you like most about F5 Advanced WAF?
It's a fairly easy-to-use and user-friendly tool. My administrators and team also like its ability to customize the rules per the requirements.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Advanced WAF?
The setup cost is normal, yet not the best in terms of the commercial aspect. Other competitors like Fortinet are cheaper than F5.
What needs improvement with F5 Advanced WAF?
One improvement for AOF could be focusing on enhancing its AI engine to make it more mature.
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
MAXIMUS, Vivo, American Systems, Bangladesh Post Office, City Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs. F5 Advanced WAF and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
841,004 professionals have used our research since 2012.