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

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

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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

Cloudflare Web Application ...

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.4%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 1.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is 2.1%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	5.4%
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks	2.1%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	1.8%
Other	90.7%

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Dean Barisic

CTO at PlayNirvana

Advanced security reporting has protected high-traffic betting platforms from constant attacks

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we have a dedicated IT team for that, and I'm not involved with Cloudflare much anymore. But if I were to compare them to F5, I would like to see more features that F5 offers. F5 has an option to bring the whole infrastructure, the whole WAF and all their packages, Bot Management, and everything else on your infrastructure. You need to install certain services from their side, and then you can choose if you would like requests to hit your servers immediately or if requests need to be proxied through F5 backbone. That would be a nice addition because we have 90% of the traffic as legit traffic coming from whitelisted servers. If it comes from whitelisted servers, I don't need to go every request through the backbone; I could easily just IP whitelist everything. Then I could maybe have Bot Management on my infrastructure that drastically reduces the price of Cloudflare. I would like to see Push CDN more improved in the next release of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. And maybe something similar to Pushpin that Fastly has, which is an option where you can push messages that then can be scaled globally over the network. From our perspective, if we have a listener that listens for stock updates, I would just need to have one processor that pushes those updates to the Cloudflare API, and then Cloudflare would broadcast that message to all listeners. Cloudflare will check the order of the message, and if you, as a customer, are not connected or have some kind of network issue, when you reconnect, you will receive the latest state and missing updates.

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Mohan Janarthanan

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.

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reviewer2776578

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We extensively use the solution every day. The solution is very stable; we haven’t seen any glitches."

"The most valuable part of the solution for us overall is exactly that it is a Software-as-a-Service product."

"The initial setup process is simple."

"Technical support has a very fast response time and they are helpful."

"Cloudflare is cheaper compared to Azure WAF, which I have considered before."

"I'm highly satisfied. It's remarkably user-friendly, enabling me to quickly identify issues, and deploy solutions, and it offers the necessary features."

"It is a SaaS solution unlike much of the competition."

"Caching is the most valuable feature of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

"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."

"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services provides a single unified console for security operations, network operations, and DevOps across all environments."

"In a multi-cloud or distributed cloud, there are many protection possibilities from data to web application or API protection, including bot mitigation."

"The main benefit is Web App Security, offering a complete security package from DDoS to web application firewall, API protection, and bot mitigation."

"F5 Distributed Cloud Services is the market leader in load balancers and manages traffic really well."

"The runtime mechanism on the solution is very useful, and it has very good network mapping between containers, so if you have more than one container, you can create a content data link between them."

"The dynamic workload identity creation, attestation, and assignment is the best feature. In addition, the application dependency map across heterogeneous environments for compliance is a striking feature."

"The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is the CSPM, which we use the most. Additionally, the investigation and alerts are useful, and the creation of queries."

"I would rate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks ten out of ten."

"We are provided with a single tool to protect all of our cloud resources and applications without having to manage and reconcile compliance reports."

"We haven't had an issue with the product for over a year."

"It provides good visibility and control regardless of the complexity."

"The two most valuable features are container security and the capability to discover workloads."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pros

Cons

"We have noticed some latency when the call goes through the firewall. That could be improved."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should include port forwarding features."

"The accuracy of the Cloudflare Web Application Firewall could be improved by reducing the number of false-negative alerts."

"Their documentation could be better. They don't have documentation that explains everything well. They have documentation for everything you're looking for, but they lack a single piece of documentation to tie everything together. As a new user or beginner, it took us a little bit of time to figure out how to put all these things in place."

"The solution's learning curve can still be further reduced"

"The product can improve by having more multitenancy capability, which is currently not available."

"The reporting could be more granular."

"It would be ideal if the solution offered better log integration and more integration with different platforms."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."

"The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."

"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."

"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."

"The pricing could be adjusted to better meet the needs of typical customers in regions like Poland, where the product is considered too expensive."

"For small players, it is completely not worth it."

"The solution does not currently support servers for GCP."

"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 have discovered that Prisma is not functioning properly with GCP."

"Sometimes, when you assign subnets to regions, the IP address will jump from one location to another because it will automatically change substantially. Then, we need to add those IP subnets to our firewall for existing access. The need to update those subnets potentially causes maintenance or access issues. So far, we can only provide bigger customers with six subnets, and a small company may not be able to access those services."

"The data security model needs improvement due to integration issues with certain features and cloud providers."

"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 nice Prisma Cloud merged its modules for CSPM and infrastructure as code. It would simplify the pricing and make it easier for customers to evaluate the solution because there are different modules, and you need to add it to your subscription separately."

"Prisma Cloud's application security capabilities should be enhanced."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cloudflare offers different types of subscriptions for businesses, enterprises, and personal users, and the pricing is negotiable."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is more affordable than other solutions."

"What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing? I believe the pricing is not the best, but it's reasonable and acceptable. We also use the McAfee system in parallel. In terms of pricing, its okay - not great, but not bad either. It falls in the middle, which is acceptable. In terms of support licensing, last time, we were searching for a solution, and we considered products from resellers rather than directly from the cloud provider. However, the pricing we encountered was exceptionally high. As a result, we are inclined to select support from the reseller."

"The pricing model is very straightforward compared to the competition. You just pay per month for the product and usage."

"The solution is expensive."

"We pay $210 per month for CloudFlare WAF."

"It is not too pricey."

"The annual licensing fee is $10,000 USD."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"Regarding Prisma Cloud's pricing, we started small, and then we just kept on growing."

"Prisma Cloud Enterprise is a costly solution. You need a license for all the components. At the same time, you have everything under one roof, so I think it's still justified."

"I wouldn't mind if it were cheaper. We are spending a fair amount of money on Prisma Cloud."

"Prisma Cloud is a value-back cloud-managed solution; cloud-native solutions are quite expensive."

"Although the cost can be high, the value is worth the price tag."

"Prisma Cloud is affordable."

"If a competitor came along and said, "We'll give you half the price," that doesn't necessarily mean that's the right answer, at all. We wouldn't necessarily entertain it that way. Does it do what we need it to do? Does it work with the things that we want it to work with? That is the important part for us. Pricing wasn't the big consideration it might be in some organizations. We spend millions on public cloud. In that context, it would not make sense to worry about the small price differences that you get between the products."

"The pricing and licensing are expensive compared to the other offerings that we considered."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

19%

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	6

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	37
Midsize Enterprise	22
Large Enterprise	56

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

The price of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is reasonable.

What needs improvement with Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

I don't see room for improvement to Cloudflare Web Application Firewall. One thing I don't know much about because we...

What is your primary use case for Cloudflare Web Application Firewall?

We are using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's advanced reporting and analytics tools with their Zero Trust, so e...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

I am not involved in sales, so I do not deal with the pricing aspect directly. I give the cost of the solution a four...

What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

There are some gaps between the implementation, expectation, and the reality. The main point is user integration with...

What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?

F5 Distributed Cloud Services works as a Software as a Service based security, networking, and application management...

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...

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 valu...

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Product Reports

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Download Cloudflare Web Application Firewall product report

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall report

CDN

Download F5 Distributed Cloud Services product report

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Download Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks product report

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report

Also Known As

Cloudflare WAF

No data available

Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto

Overview

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's intuitive dashboard enables users to build powerful rules through easy clicks and also provides Terraform integration. Every request to the WAF is inspected against the rule engine and the threat intelligence curated from protecting over 27 Million websites. Suspicious requests can be blocked, challenged or logged as per the needs of the user while legitimate requests are routed to the destination, agnostic of whether it lives on-premise or in the cloud. Analytics and Cloudflare Logs enable visibility into actionable metrics for the user.

Cloudflare

F5 Distributed Cloud Services excel in enhancing security, optimizing web application delivery, and ensuring robust network performance. Users value its integrated Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, global server load balancing, and intuitive management interface. It boosts organizational efficiency, reduces operational costs, and scales seamlessly, making it essential for businesses operating in distributed environments.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks provides comprehensive cloud-native security solutions. It covers dynamic workload identity, automated forensics, and multi-cloud protection, ensuring robust security across diverse cloud platforms.

Prisma Cloud delivers advanced capabilities for managing cloud security across AWS, Azure, and GCP platforms. It offers dynamic workload identity creation, real-time monitoring, and seamless integration into CI/CD pipelines. With automation, centralized dashboards, and enhanced visibility, users effectively manage security misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. While optimizing cloud environments through runtime protection and compliance, Prisma Cloud faces challenges with its navigation, pricing, and limited automation capabilities. Users seek improvements in API security, role-based access controls, and documentation quality, emphasizing the need for enhanced customization and reporting features.

What are the important features of Prisma Cloud?

Dynamic Workload Identity: Enables unique workload identities for security purposes.
Automated Forensics: Offers detailed insights into threats and incidents automatically.
Runtime Protection: Provides ongoing detection and blocking of suspicious activities.
Multi-Cloud Security: Protects environments on AWS, Azure, and GCP simultaneously.
Compliance Management: Assists in meeting regulatory standards across cloud platforms.

What benefits or ROI should users consider in reviews?

Enhanced Security Posture: Strengthens cloud defense lines with proactive monitoring.
Centralized Dashboard: Offers unified oversight of multiple cloud environments.
Efficient Misconfiguration Handling: Quickly identifies and addresses security lapses.
Seamless CI/CD Integration: Integrates security within development workflows.
Improved Visibility: Provides transparent insights into security operations and alerts.

Industries like finance and telecom rely on Prisma Cloud for managing cloud security posture and container security. Teams utilize its capabilities across hybrid and multi-cloud settings to ensure compliance and robust threat protection. Features like misconfiguration detection and runtime monitoring are critical in promoting security objectives in these sectors.

Palo Alto Networks

Sample Customers

crunchbase, udacity, marketo, okcupid, zendesk

Information Not Available

Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America

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