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 February 2026, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall is 5.6%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. 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
Product	Market Share (%)
Cloudflare Web Application Firewall	5.6%
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks	2.0%
F5 Distributed Cloud Services	1.7%
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

"The product has a valuable security control functionality."

"The Cloudflare Web Application Firewall's most valuable feature is its ease of configuration."

"The stability of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall deserves a perfect 10 out of 10."

"It protects web applications efficiently."

"Does a good job preventing web application attacks."

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

"Some of the most valuable features of Cloudflare Web Application Firewall include its DNS zone setup and the zero trust policy."

"Someone with a basic understanding of networking and security will be able to implement the firewall's basic features within 15 minutes."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pros

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

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

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

"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."

"I would say Twistlock is a fairly sophisticated tool."

"It is user-friendly. It has a good look and feel and reporting structure. It provides a single pane of glass. These are the things that I like."

"Integrating with a CI/CD pipeline and incorporating a vulnerability assessment process are highly effective features, especially when combined with runtime protection."

"Syslog CLIs are the best feature."

"My favorite feature is the CWPP module. We can define various kinds of rules for vulnerabilities, incidents, or suspicious activities."

"It provides insights into potential vulnerabilities in our code, helping us identify and rectify issues before they can be exploited."

"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 solution offers very good configuration capabilities."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pros

Cons

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

"There could be an option to duplicate the cluster to maintain the consistency of rules."

"The notification part could be improved. It's very much connected to Web Application Firewall, rate-limiting, and DDoS protection."

"The platform's control features related to real-time authentication and response time need improvement."

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

"The dashboard could be more user-friendly."

"Cloudflare Web Application Firewall should improve visibility for a customer."

"They need to improve their support because getting a response for basic requests took around 48 hours, which is too long."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall cons

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

"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."

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

"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."

"We would like it to have more features from the risk and compliance perspectives."

"More documentation with real-world use cases would be helpful."

"It does not provide runtime security or protection for Windows Server. It is currently lacking in terms of Windows environment."

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

"The feedback that we have given to the Palo Alto team is that the UI can be improved. When you press the "back" button on your browser from the Investigate tab, the query that you're working on just disappears. It won't keep the query on the "back" button."

"Palo Alto should work on ease-of-use and the user-friendliness to be more competitive with some competing products."

"They need to improve the API gateway."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

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

"The solution's pricing option needs to be more transparent for enterprise clients."

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

"It starts at $20 and can easily go up to $200 monthly"

"The solution is expensive."

More Cloudflare Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

Information not available

"From my exposure so far, they have been really flexible on whatever your current state is, with a view to what the future state might be. There's no hard sell. They "get" the journey that you're on, and they're trying to help you embrace cloud security, governance, and compliance as you go."

"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."

"Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks has helped the company save some money. Cost-wise, it's okay."

"Prisma Cloud is cost-efficient, but the credits are on the higher end."

"Prisma Cloud is more expensive than some other solutions, but when we consider all of its use cases, the cost averages out."

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

"Prisma Cloud is more expensive than Check Point CloudGuard."

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

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pricing and cost advice

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882,333 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Insurance Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

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	36
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 really use the rule-based logic feature or utilize the WAF's ability to scale as a cloud-based service. I don...

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

I'm using Cloudflare Web Application Firewall on all my domains and any client domains I have; I set them up with a C...

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?

It's a long way to be perfect, of course, as with all solutions. The main issue is integration with other parts or pr...

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 applic...

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...

Fortinet FortiWeb vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Comparisons

Compared 9% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard WAF vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Web Application Firewall vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 6% of the time

Imperva Application Security Platform vs Cloudflare Web Application Firewall

Compared 5% of the time

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Akamai vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 10% of the time

Cloudflare vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 10% of the time

Azure Front Door vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 10% of the time

Radware Cloud WAF Service vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 9% of the time

IIS PHP Windows vs F5 Distributed Cloud Services

Compared 2% of the time

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Wiz vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 10% of the time

Cyera vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 8% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 5% of the time

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 4% of the time

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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

January 2026

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report

Download Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks product 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