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Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Symantec Data Center Security comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Qualys TotalCloud
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (10th), Container Security (11th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (9th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (7th)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (7th), Container Security (2nd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (2nd)
Symantec Data Center Security
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.9
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks10.1%
Wiz12.5%
Microsoft Defender for Cloud6.7%
Other70.7%
Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
Cloud and Data Center Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Symantec Data Center Security3.6%
Illumio Segmentation13.4%
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation11.4%
Other71.6%
Cloud and Data Center Security
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2859021 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Security Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Risk-based triage has transformed container security and now prioritizes high-impact threats
The best features Qualys TotalCloud offers currently include managing cloud infrastructure and container security while facing major challenges such as alert fatigue. Traditional vulnerability scanners flag hundreds of CVEs on short-lived Kubernetes containers, some of which have no internet exposure or are gone before we can even triage them. I leverage Qualys TotalCloud to move beyond static CVSS. I use it to implement runtime exposure, correlation risk reprioritization, and shift-left integration. This notifies developers to fix a base image upstream rather than patching live ephemeral instances. In my work with cloud and container security, the biggest operational hurdle was alert fatigue. I use Qualys to shift left from static CVSS severity to context-aware risk prioritization. I correlated raw vulnerability data with real-time risk factors such as public network exposure, active runtime execution, or overly permissive IAM roles. This allows us to immediately drop the priority of isolated containers and escalate lower-severity CVEs that sit on an exposed, high-risk path. We can map these findings directly back to our CI/CD pipelines so developers can patch the root base images upstream. We have drastically cut down the signal-to-noise ratio, saved a lot of manual hours doing triage work, and ensured engineering effort goes directly towards high-impact risk reduction.
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.
Muhammad Ejaz ul Hassan - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Continuous server hardening has protected critical legacy workloads and simplified security control
Symantec is lagging on the reporting side. I have been working for 10 years and I have identified many gray areas. As a user protecting your infrastructure, you need to sell the value to your management. Management buys the tool for preventing threats, and it works for them. However, you cannot sell it because every solution needs to show what happened in the last few years or how you will be protected in the future. Reporting is the most important thing for the CIO level, not the admin level. I have seen Symantec really lag in this area. I am creating my own tool to build a dashboard to share with the CIO level because they want to know what happened last week, last month, and last year. These reports will tell you about activities. Symantec changed the licensing when Broadcom acquired the company. The question of who will provide support became unclear. Support has now changed and they are making money. I have seen that most of the time when you ask implementation questions, they do not answer you. If you have a problem, they give you a low-level engineer at the first level. This delays resolution. Support has to be better.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Vulnerability and threat detection and assessment of the criticality of the vulnerabilities exposed are most valuable."
"The scalability is good as well. I would rate it ten out of ten."
"Qualys TotalCloud is an excellent platform, and the beauty of the platform is that we can get all the vulnerabilities, see all the reports in a single dashboard, view them segregated, and easily learn about critical, high, and medium findings with appropriately provided remediation steps."
"Qualys TotalCloud provides a single, prioritized view based on requirements such as identifying the most vulnerable assets and calculating the average time to remediate vulnerabilities."
"I would rate Qualys TotalCloud ten out of ten."
"If I had to say something positive about the product that brings me the biggest benefit, I would say it has accurate reports, gets new update CVEs, zero-day attack detection, and is easy to manage with its GUI."
"Qualys TotalCloud has significantly reduced our workload in terms of managing risks, helping us to be more efficient and save substantial resources."
"The biggest strengths of Qualys TotalCloud are that it is pretty good at cloud visibility, has easy integration, and also has multi-cloud compatibility."
"We feel like we have power in our hands, with full visibility into what is happening at the endpoint level."
"Prisma Cloud's real-time detection and monitoring of our entire system is the most useful."
"In the GlobalProtect module, we can easily guide users experiencing connection issues through the notification column."
"The CWP module, runtime protection, and WAAS API are valuable."
"Aporeto has accelerated our client's expansion to the cloud, securing their Linux workloads on any infrastructure with end-to-end encryption and providing a path for modernizing with a security layer that is future-proofed."
"What I like most about Prisma Cloud is its zero-day signatures, maximum security, minimal downtime, cloud visibility, control, and ease of deployment."
"Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks offers very good deep security assessment, and it uses a very good internal engine, which is the core Palo Alto processing and engines."
"This solution helped us by allowing us to schedule and fix things. This is not an easy thing if you're managing 1,000 plus resources."
"The console and tools are very user-friendly."
"Overall, this is a pretty good product."
"We have not reduced manpower, the number of servers has gone up, but the number of incidents has tricked down to single digits."
"The most valuable feature is the endpoint protection system."
"The ability to finely control permissions and restrictions on servers or assets through a customizable rule set is a key strength."
"We use the product to prevent unauthorized access to data, systems, and servers. It provides essential features for data center security."
"The monitoring in the management console allows us to find out what is going wrong, and it gets reports even before the user reports it."
"The tool will then detect any anomalies, such as an intruder who has breached the network, which can trigger the system lockdown feature if it's enabled and meets the defined threshold."
 

Cons

"We would like to see Windows-based sensors available in Qualys, as this would make the platform more versatile and support a broader range of environments."
"In a future release, I suggest that zero-day vulnerabilities should be predicted in advance using AI technologies. The system is not 100% secure yet, so proactive threat hunting could be enhanced to be more proactive than the current system."
"Areas that need improvement in every solution include the remediation part. The remediation steps should be simple enough for everyone to understand."
"The improvement needed in Qualys TotalCloud is mainly in the artificial intelligence automation agents, where we can customize and create what meets our needs, not necessarily having to use those provided in the tool."
"There is a lack of data segregation according to criticality or inventory."
"The support is not up to the mark and seems to be overburdened."
"Qualys TotalCloud can be improved in the integration piece, especially with ServiceNow, where there's a bidirectional sync integrated, as there is no native capability from Qualys that can give monitoring metrics of how many assets came in and how many failed or were not properly reconciled or combined."
"There should be improvement from a dashboard perspective when collecting and showcasing data to lead management."
"One definite area for improvement is the auto-remediation or the CWP area. The second one is the RQL language. It is still not very flexible and does not cover a lot of use cases. The RQL language could be dramatically improved to add more options."
"We face some GUI issues related to new permissions for AWS. So far, we don't have any automation to complete them through the GUI. We have to manually update the permissions. Our customers have faced some issues with that."
"For some custom policies, we need more features."
"In terms of improvement, there are some small things like hardening and making sure the Linux resources are deployed well but that's more at an operational level."
"The automation must continue to become much smoother."
"I don't think their SaaS offering is adoptable by large enterprises like ours, in every case."
"Currently, custom reports are available, but I feel that those reports are targeting just the L1 or L2 engineers because they are very verbose. So, for every alert, there is a proper description, but as a security posture management portal, Prisma Cloud should give me a dashboard that I can present to my stakeholders, such as CSO, CRO, or CTO. It should be at a little bit higher level. They should definitely put effort into reporting because the reporting does not reflect the requirements of a dashboard for your stakeholders. There are a couple of things that are present on the portal, but we don't have the option to customize dashboards or widgets. There are a limited set of widgets, and those widgets don't add value from the perspective of a security team or any professional who is above L1 or L2 level. Because of this, the reach of Prisma Cloud in an organization or the access to Prisma Cloud will be limited only to L1 and L2 engineers. This is something that their development team should look into."
"We had some teething issues with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, but overall, it did what we expected."
"Could have better reporting capabilities and better support."
"They need to develop a more flexible product that can be scaled such that it fits well into a small business or a bigger, enterprise-level solution."
"It would be advantageous if Symantec or Broadcom, given the rebranding, could simplify the process, enabling users to leverage the antivirus functionality more easily."
"A user or administrator making the policy in the DCS should have a very thorough knowledge of the operating system or policy making. You have to be very specific about the data structure."
"There is room for improvement in enhancing its graphical user interface for a more user-friendly experience."
"I think that technical support in general is not really capable of doing their work. They don't have enough knowledge to provide quick solutions, so we usually try to resolve problems within our team."
"Symantec is lagging on the reporting side."
"The support is very bad. They're not fast at all. Trend Micro's support is much better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am not sure about the pricing. From what I understand, it is a bit on the higher side, but I do not have the exact numbers."
"Its price seems higher compared to other tools, but it is worth it. If they could adjust the pricing and make it comparable with other tools, that would be great."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers cost-effective licensing flexibility."
"While Qualys TotalCloud's pricing is currently acceptable, it is becoming increasingly expensive and may soon be considered overpriced."
"The pricing for TotalCloud is attractive and competitive in the market. Given the features, especially the dashboard, I have no concerns regarding pricing."
"As a middle management member, I do not have direct pricing knowledge, but based on the knowledge from our meetings, its pricing is competitive."
"Although Qualys TotalCloud is relatively expensive due to its unique automation features, its cost-effectiveness is rated an eight out of ten, with ten being the most costly."
"The cost is high, but it meets our organizational needs."
"Prisma Cloud is cost-efficient, but the credits are on the higher end."
"Prisma Cloud is a high-end enterprise solution, making it quite expensive."
"The Prisma Cloud pricing is good."
"You can expect a premium price because it is a premium quality product by a leading supplier."
"Almost all the CSPM tools are pretty expensive."
"Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks carries a higher cost, but its enhanced security measures justify the expense."
"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 pricing and the licensing are both very fair... The biggest advice I would give in terms of costs would be to try to understand what the growth is going to look like. That's really been our biggest struggle, that we don't have an idea of what our future growth is going to be on the platform. We go from X number of licenses to Y number of licenses without a plan on how we're going to get from A to B, and a lot of that comes as a bit of a surprise. It can make budgeting a real challenge for it."
"The product is a bit costly."
"Compared to some other solutions, such as CrowdStrike, Symantec is more expensive."
"It is notably more expensive when compared to other solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
18%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
19%
Construction Company
16%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise38
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise58
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qualys TotalCloud?
I was not involved in pricing, setup cost, and licensing, but I can say that the setup was fast, within a quarter, an...
What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
In terms of improvements, the features we are using in Qualys TotalCloud are working in the best optimal way, and I d...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
I have been using Qualys TotalCloud for the last eight months to scan the hardware and the virtual devices in our inf...
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...
What needs improvement with Symantec Data Center Security?
Symantec is lagging on the reporting side. I have been working for 10 years and I have identified many gray areas. As...
What is your primary use case for Symantec Data Center Security?
As a partner support, we handle all Symantec products for various clients. Currently, we work with DLP, Symantec Endp...
What advice do you have for others considering Symantec Data Center Security?
I am still a Symantec partner. Price rating is five out of ten. Symantec Data Center Security is a perfect solution, ...
 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne and others in Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP). Updated: October 2026.
917,181 professionals have used our research since 2012.