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

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

Sponsored
 

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
43
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (11th), Container Security (12th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (8th), 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 Networks10.5%
Wiz12.4%
Microsoft Defender for Cloud7.2%
Other69.9%
Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
Cloud and Data Center Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Symantec Data Center Security3.3%
Illumio Segmentation14.0%
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation12.2%
Other70.5%
Cloud and Data Center Security
 

Featured Reviews

RO
IT Security Expert at Alior Bank S.A.
Unified risk scoring has improved our cloud visibility and simplifies remediation priorities
Qualys TotalCloud provides unified vulnerability and threat assessment across both IAS and SaaS. This solution provides a single prioritized view of risk, which helps reduce the work I would have to do. We are no longer based on CVSS; we are based on Qualys risk scoring, which is based on CVSS plus internal findings made by Qualys, and then assigns its own score. The TruRisk insight feature has found a small number of assets with high vulnerability scores, though I am cautious since some information is classified. Qualys TotalCloud has positively impacted our bank's performance, and we have definitely seen benefits after implementing this solution.
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

"The most valuable feature is extensibility."
"Its dashboards are brilliant. It provides in-depth insights."
"I depend heavily on the reports that I have from this tool."
"One of the most valuable features of Qualys TotalCloud is FlexScan, which is specifically for internet-facing VMs. We found this feature to be very useful. It was a key differentiator for us."
"TotalCloud's best feature is the integration of cloud accounts. It helps with the risk and security posture management of our cloud infrastructure."
"Qualys TotalCloud has significantly improved our organization by automating our reporting processes, reducing the time spent on report creation from two hours to less than fifteen to twenty minutes."
"Qualys TotalCloud has improved our security posture."
"I appreciate Qualys TotalCloud's ability to onboard any type of device with ease, including containers."
"The product is quite good for providing multi-clouds or cross-cloud security from a single-pane -of-glass."
"The container and serverless security is most valuable. It is quite a new technology for this region. Even though containers have been there for a long time, the adoption of containers is very minimal in this region. When it comes to using Kubernetes containers in a complex architecture, there is a lack of security in the market. People aren't aware of the security controls or the process for governance. Container security provided by Prisma Cloud is quite good at filling that gap."
"The CSPM and CWPP functionalities are pretty good."
"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."
"Prisma Cloud's inventory reporting is pretty good."
"Engineering is thinking it's easy to integrate because we use many Red Hat products."
"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."
"I would say Twistlock is a fairly sophisticated tool."
"The file integrity monitoring features are the most valuable features of this product."
"Symantec Data Center Security, as a name, represents the perfect solution if you want to harden your servers."
"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 most valuable feature is the endpoint protection system."
"The real strength lies in its straightforward approach, offering just two key policies: prevention and detection."
"The advantage of Data Center Security is its ease of use and that it serves as a single unified platform, where I can apply all my security policies to protect that server."
"We have not reduced manpower, the number of servers has gone up, but the number of incidents has tricked down to single digits."
"The console and tools are very user-friendly."
 

Cons

"An area for improvement would be to focus on risks related to AI, such as large language models and potential data leakage."
"It has been working very well, but it would be helpful if the dashboard could generate reports tailored to specific compliance needs. For example, in India, we have to comply with RBI and SEBI guidelines. It w"
"The main area needing improvement is integration. Although the team is strengthening TotalCloud, integration can be enhanced with SIEM, SOAR, ITSM, and other sources."
"There should be improvement from a dashboard perspective when collecting and showcasing data to lead management."
"The support is not up to the mark and seems to be overburdened."
"We encountered challenges identifying the correct resource category for certain items, such as those in containers or storage."
"From a downside perspective, the UI is not user-friendly and feels dated compared to other tools like Prisma Cloud."
"The areas in the solution that have room for improvement include the UI/UX design, which should be improved, and they should integrate more artificial intelligence into the product."
"Some module customization might be needed and certain features like adding custom labels are currently unavailable unless we have administrator access."
"They charge seven workloads for monitoring one compute, and that is quite expensive. This makes it difficult to move fully with the compute part because of the workload."
"There should be some kind of automation, AI incorporation, and bot system. All these would add value."
"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 would like it to have more features from the risk and compliance perspectives."
"Getting new guys trained on using the solution requires some thought. If someone is already trained on Palo Alto then he's able to adapt quickly. But, if someone is coming from another platform such as Fortinet, or maybe he's from the system side, that is where we need some help. We need to find out if there is an online track or training that they can go to."
"The first time I looked at Prisma Cloud, it took me a while to understand how to implement the integration or how to enable features by using the interface for integration. That portion can probably be improved."
"They need to make the settings more flexible to fit our internal policies about data."
"Agent management is a challenging task."
"There is plenty of room for improvement with this product, and it could start with platform metrics."
"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."
"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."
"The support is very bad. They're not fast at all. Trend Micro's support is much better."
"Since the acquisition of Symantec, our customers have not been satisfied with this solution."
"There is room for improvement in enhancing its graphical user interface for a more user-friendly experience."
"Symantec is lagging on the reporting side."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As a middle management member, I do not have direct pricing knowledge, but based on the knowledge from our meetings, its pricing is competitive."
"TotalCloud's price is about right where I would expect it to be."
"Qualys TotalCloud is cost-efficient and was selected for its value compared to other products."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers cost-effective licensing flexibility."
"The cost is high, but it meets our organizational needs."
"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive, but it offers a premier solution with no headaches."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers good pricing that is affordable and competitive with the market. Our partnership also provides us with additional benefits."
"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."
"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."
"The licensing cost is a bit high on the compute side."
"In general, Prisma Cloud is much cheaper than cloud-native services."
"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 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."
"Prisma Cloud is cost-efficient, but the credits are on the higher end."
"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."
"Prisma Cloud is more expensive than some other solutions, but when we consider all of its use cases, the cost averages out."
"Compared to some other solutions, such as CrowdStrike, Symantec is more expensive."
"It is notably more expensive when compared to other solutions."
"The product is a bit costly."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) solutions are best for your needs.
910,437 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Construction Company
17%
Outsourcing Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise32
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 needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
To be totally honest, I do not have any best features because I have had a bad experience using this tool, especially...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
My main use case for Qualys TotalCloud is vulnerability management and exposure management. I use this tool to evalua...
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: August 2026.
910,437 professionals have used our research since 2012.