No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

 

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

F5 Distributed Cloud Services
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
16th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
CDN (6th), API Security (8th)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
7th
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)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 2.0%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is 1.8%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks1.8%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services2.0%
Other96.2%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Mohan Janarthanan - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Vice President at Novac Technology Solutions
Centralized security has protected APIs and optimized multi‑cloud traffic management
F5 Distributed Cloud Services has been used for two years for DDoS protection, and there is a particular feature called API protection. Within API protection, there is malicious user mitigation, which is one particular technology that has been implemented. This is a kind of advanced bot attack prevention. Malicious user mitigation is an AI/ML-based technology that was introduced by the F5 team, and this particular MUG protects rate limiting. If some users are having anomaly detection or someone is trying to do a bot attack, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge for that particular user alone and not for all users. For example, if someone is trying to act as a rogue, it will create a CAPTCHA challenge in the backend system on that particular system, so they cannot try again and again at the same time. It is for a concurrent session, and it will give the CAPTCHA challenge. This MUG, malicious user mitigation, prevents bot attacks. F5 Distributed Cloud Services includes the real-time intelligence feature, which helps with threat response strategies from a threat intelligence perspective. For example, if there are geo-restrictions or geo-based restrictions, sometimes people may come in through proxy-based servers, and it will prevent that. The load balancing feature optimizes application performance. Observability is the basic piece where F5 got introduced. This observability piece provides end-to-end visibility on the application performance. It gives complete end-to-end visibility across network latency and application performance issues. Sometimes when it is getting more than 200 pages, it throws errors such as 300, 400, or whatever has been configured, including 500 errors. F5 Distributed Cloud Services has helped improve traffic management efficiency. Most applications are hosted in the Check Point and F5 firewall, F5 web application firewall, where applications and traffic management can be accessed in a single dashboard. Automated threat detection is a basic feature of F5 Distributed Cloud Services meant for that purpose. There are two scenarios with automated threat detection, which is provided by F5. It is a completely machine learning solution that came from the bot defense, and it automatically protects against sophisticated attacks.
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

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."
"F5 is known for being the best load balancer in the market. Customers with an existing module can easily adopt additional modules without investing in new hardware."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."
"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."
"I appreciate the UI of F5 Distributed Cloud Services and the backend cost, alongside the actual value proposition that they provide with the load balancer, which is excellent."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."
"Elastic environments are the most valuable features because I can pull these apps and migrate the on-premises environment to the Distributed Cloud environment, and this capability is very strong and the security regarding the apps is really very powerful."
"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."
"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."
"It scans our containers in real time. Also, as they're built, it's looking into the container repository where the images are built, telling us ahead of time, "You have vulnerabilities here, and you should update this code before you deploy." And once it's deployed, it's scanning for vulnerabilities that are in production as the container is running."
"Prisma Cloud is a single tool that we can use to protect all of our cloud resources without having to manage and reconcile several security and compliance reports."
"My impression of Prisma Cloud was pretty good; it's an amazing tool that gives the whole view of your container environment and connection with multiple platforms, such as Splunk, and it is a good solution."
"With the query language, we can analyze logs and find out which IPs are malicious. It also provides a graphical representation. It provides the overall visibility and how the traffic is flowing. We can see where the malicious IP is and whether it is an insider threat or an outsider threat."
"The CSPM and CWPP functionalities are pretty good."
"It supports the multi-cloud environment beautifully."
"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."
 

Cons

"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."
"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."
"The worst experience is that with so many solutions available, it is very complicated to know all of the solution modules, and the offers from F5 Distributed Cloud Services are vast."
"One area where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can be improved is in API security, which can be enhanced."
"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the perspective of implementation and customer expectations, which sometimes differ from reality."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"When it comes to protecting the full cloud-native stack, it has the right breadth. They're covering all the topics I would care about, like container, cloud configuration, and serverless. There's one gap. There could be a better set of features around identity management—native AWS—IAM roles, and service account management. The depth in each of those areas varies a little bit. While they may have the breadth, I think there's still work to do in flushing out each of those feature sets."
"I think Prisma Cloud could improve its preventive governance policy and CWP run time modules."
"The alignment of Twistlock Defender agents with image repositories needs improvement."
"Support is an area that needs improvement."
"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."
"Palo Alto needs to add more support staff to improve their response time."
"We would like to have the detections be more contemporaneous. For example, we've seen detections of an overprivileged user or whatever it might be in any of the hundreds of Prisma policies, where there are 50 minutes of latency between the event and the alert."
"It would be ideal if they could somehow reduce the deployment time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing and licensing are expensive compared to the other offerings that we considered."
"Prisma Cloud is a value-back cloud-managed solution; cloud-native solutions are quite expensive."
"Almost all the CSPM tools are pretty expensive."
"I don't know a better way to do it, but their licensing is a little confusing. That's due to the breadth of different types of technologies they are trying to cover. The way you license depends on where you're securing. When they were Twistlock it was a simple licensing scheme and you could tell what you were doing. Now that they've changed that scheme with Palo Alto, it is quite confusing. It's very difficult to predict what your costs are going to be as you try to expand coverage."
"The cost depends on the pricing model. Compared to other solutions, the cost isn't that bad."
"I wouldn't mind if it were cheaper. We are spending a fair amount of money on Prisma Cloud."
"Prisma Cloud licensing works on credits."
"The licensing cost is a bit high on the compute side."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.
910,454 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise58
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
F5 Distributed Cloud Services is affordable. I think it is very affordable. I do not think it is expensive.
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
One area where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can be improved is in API security, which can be enhanced.Specifically, the confidence level on API security that F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
My main use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services is WAF protection.I am using F5 Distributed Cloud Services primarily for securing my infrastructure with layer 7 protection, which F5 provides. Th...
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

Information Not Available
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 F5 Distributed Cloud Services vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
910,454 professionals have used our research since 2012.