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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)
21st
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
CDN (10th), API Security (8th)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
113
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 February 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of F5 Distributed Cloud Services is 1.7%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is 2.0%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks2.0%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services1.7%
Other96.3%
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

Mohan Janarthanan - PeerSpot reviewer
Assosiate 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

"Technical support from F5 is good compared to Cisco and HP."
"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."
"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."
"The reporting, dashboarding, and filtering capabilities which provide reports we can present to our senior staff are the most helpful features of Prisma Cloud (Annual Contract)."
"I find the CSPM area to be a more valuable and flexible feature."
"The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud is WAF (web application firewall)."
"I was looking for a vulnerability scanner and I was looking for one place in which I could find everything. This tool not only does vulnerability scanning, but it also gives me an asset management tool."
"The most valuable features are vulnerability monitoring, serverless access, container runtime features, and Defender."
"The policies that come prepackaged in the tool have been very valuable to us. They're accurate and they provide good guidance as to why the policy was created, as well as how to remediate anything that violates the policy."
"Prisma Cloud is quite simple to use. The web GUI is powerful. Prisma Cloud scans the overall architecture of the AWS network to identify open ports and other vulnerabilities, then highlights them."
"Configuration monitoring and alerting is the most valuable feature; it happens at the cloud's speed, allowing our development team to respond quickly. If a configuration goes against our security best practices, we're alerted promptly and can act to resolve the issue. As cloud security staff, we're not staring at the cloud all the time, and we want to let the developers do their jobs so that our company is protected and work is proceeding within our security controls."
 

Cons

"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."
"Last year there was a downtime of 30 minutes across the cloud distributed console, and that was the only impact observed."
"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 main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF."
"The integration of the Compute function into the cloud monitoring function—because those are two different tools that are being combined together—could use some more work. It still feels a little bit disjointed."
"To see the full picture, at least when I last used it in April or May, you needed to switch between the modules. To see the cloud infrastructure and pipeline configuration, you need to switch to that module. To see the code security part, you need to switch to the Code Security module. It is the same story with CSPM. Two competitors of Prisma Cloud do it in a better way. They show the full view of a risk. Prisma Cloud unfortunately lacks in that area, but they are catching up."
"The innovation side of the solution could be more efficient and more detailed."
"The user interface should be improved and made easier."
"Palo Alto needs to add more support staff to improve their response time."
"One of the requests is that Prisma Defender for the ECS solution is only supported for Linux. It does not support Windows."
"I think Prisma Cloud could improve its preventive governance policy and CWP run time modules."
"Some module customization might be needed and certain features like adding custom labels are currently unavailable unless we have administrator access."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks carries a higher cost, but its enhanced security measures justify the expense."
"Prisma Cloud is affordable."
"The pricing of the solution is fair."
"Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is a highly expensive solution."
"The pricing is good. They gave us some good discounts right at the end of the year based on the value that it brings, visibility, and the ability to build in cloud, compliance, and security within one dashboard."
"Regarding Prisma Cloud's pricing, we started small, and then we just kept on growing."
"The Prisma Cloud pricing is good."
"I find the pricing to be expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
8%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business36
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise56
 

Questions from the Community

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 out of ten since it is not a cheap product.
What needs improvement with F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
It's a long way to be perfect, of course, as with all solutions. The main issue is integration with other parts or products of F5, like on-premise WAF. There are some problems, mainly from the pers...
What is your primary use case for F5 Distributed Cloud Services?
There are two main use cases for Distributed Call Services: DDoS or Distributed attacks protection and WAF web application security or firewall.
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: February 2026.
882,103 professionals have used our research since 2012.