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

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

Why PeerSpot?
 

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

"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."
"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."
"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 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."
"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."
"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."
"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."
"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."
"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."
"Prisma was extremely comprehensive. It's easy to drill down to gather more information and keep going. It seemed like you could drill down forever to see what the vulnerability was linked to."
"The framework to configure controls is pretty good; it's pretty sophisticated. We can implement a fair amount of testing for a fair number of controls."
"The product provides very good network security."
"The most valuable feature is that the rule set is managed and that it can be run on a regularly scheduled basis."
"The Twistlock vulnerability scanning tool is its most valuable feature. It provides us insight into security vulnerabilities, running inside both on-premise and public cloud-based container platforms. It is filling a gap that we have with traditional vulnerability scanning tools, where we don't have the ability to scan inside containers."
"It has improved the overall collaboration between SecOps and DevOps. Now, instead of asking people to do something, it is a default offering in the CI/CD. There is less manual intervention and more seamless integration. It is why we don't have many dependencies across many teams, which is definitely a better state."
 

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."
"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."
"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."
"One area where F5 Distributed Cloud Services can be improved is in API security, which can be enhanced."
"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."
"For small players, it is completely not worth it."
"Sometimes we do get false alerts. That should be improved."
"The cost of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is too high. I would also appreciate the addition of NLP to reduce the learning curve and make configuring queries more user-friendly."
"There should be some kind of automation, AI incorporation, and bot system. All these would add value."
"I don't think their SaaS offering is adoptable by large enterprises like ours, in every case."
"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."
"They should improve the user experience."
"They are missing some compatibility details in their documentation."
"If I were to improve Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, I would enhance the integration with other vendors."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The price is high. In the future, when there are more competitors at the same level with different clouds, maybe the position will be different."
"You can expect a premium price because it is a premium quality product by a leading supplier."
"The pricing for Prisma Cloud is high. Providing a pay-as-you-go model or pricing options tailored for medium and small enterprises could help attract more clients."
"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."
"One thing we're very pleased about is how the licensing model for Prisma is based on work resources. You buy a certain amount of work resources and then, as they enable new capabilities within Prisma, it just takes those work resource units and applies them to new features. This enables us to test and use the new features without having to go back and ask for and procure a whole new product, which could require going through weeks, and maybe months, of a procurement process."
"The cost was not on the higher side. Overall, the cost gets recovered with its implementation."
"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."
"We are encountering some resistance in the African market regarding the cost of Prisma Cloud."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Application Firewall (WAF) solutions are best for your needs.
911,039 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.
911,039 professionals have used our research since 2012.