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Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes vs Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform [EOL] comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 16, 2025

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
7.0
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (5th), Container Security (8th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (6th)
Red Hat Advanced Cluster Se...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (30th)
Threat Stack Cloud Security...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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.
Daniel Stevens - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Galley
Offers easy management and container connection with HTTPS, but the support needs to improve
I have experience with the solution's setup in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and our company has assisted in the development of a cluster in a research department, but we didn't start from scratch because we have IT professionals who have installed Kubernetes across 12 nodes of a cluster and a new environment can be created for a new platform. I also had another setup experience of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes in Portugal where I had to implement the solution in a cluster of 22 computer servers, which was completed with assistance from the IT department of the company. The initial setup process of the solution can be considered as difficult. The setup process involves using the permissions, subnets and range of IPs, which makes it complex. Deploying Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes takes around eight to ten hours for new clusters. The solution's deployment can be divided into three parts. The first part involves OpenStack, where the cluster's resources need to be identified. The second part involves virtualizing assets and identifying other physical assets, for which OpenStack, Kubernetes, or OpenShift are used. The third part of the deployment involves dividing the networks into subnetworks and implementing automation to deploy the microservices using Helm. The number of professionals required for the solution's deployment depends upon the presence of automated scripts. Ideally, two or three professionals are required to set up Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes.
SC
Software Development Manager at Rent Dynamics
SecOps program for us, as a smaller company, is amazing; they know what to look for
They could give a few more insights into security groups and recommendations on how to be more effective. That's getting more into the AWS environment, specifically. I'm not sure if that's Threat Stack's plan or not, but I would like them to help us be efficient about how we're setting up security groups. They could recommend separation of VPCs and the like - really dig into our architecture. I haven't seen a whole lot of that and I think that's something that, right off the bat, could have made us smarter. Even as part of the SecOps Program, that could be helpful; a quick analysis. They're analyzing our whole infrastructure and saying, "You have one VPC and that doesn't make a lot of sense, that should be multiple VPCs and here's why." The architecture of the servers in whatever cloud-hosting provider you're on could be helpful. Other than that, they should continue to expand on their notifications and on what's a vulnerability. They do a great job of that and we want them to continue to do that. It would be cool, since the agent is already deployed and they know about the server, they know the IP address, and they know what vulnerability is there, for them to test the vulnerability and see if they can actually exploit it. Or, once we patch it, they could double-check that it can't be. I don't know how hard that would be to build. Thinking on it off the top off my head, it could be a little challenging but it could also be highly interesting. It would also be great if we could test a couple of other features like hammering a server with 100 login attempts and see what happens. Real test scenarios could be really helpful. That is probably more something close to what they do with the SOC 2 audit or the report. But more visualization of that, being able to test things out on our infrastructure to make sure we can or can't hit this box could be interesting.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I depend heavily on the reports that I have from this tool."
"I appreciate Qualys TotalCloud's ability to onboard any type of device with ease, including containers."
"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."
"Multi-cloud visibility saves time and makes things easier, as we can also have comparability to see what configuration differences have been made from cloud to cloud."
"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."
"CSPM is currently the most used feature, and we are enjoying the new feature, FlexScan, which is valuable for Internet-facing VMs."
"TotalCloud offers a comprehensive suite of features, including EDR, XDR, and TrueRisk, providing a centralized platform for managing vulnerabilities and security risks."
"Once you have your vulnerabilities fixed and your patches pushed out using Qualys TotalCloud, then you are able to eliminate threats and cyber risk."
"It is easy to install and manage."
"The technical support is good."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to share resources."
"Offers easy management with authentication and authorization features"
"Segmentation is the most powerful feature."
"One of the most valuable features I found was the ability of this solution to map the network and show you the communication between your containers and your different nodes."
"I like virtualization and all those tools that come with OpenShift. I also like Advanced Cluster Management and the built-in security."
"I am impressed with the tool's visibility."
"There has been a measurable decrease in the meantime to remediation... because we have so many different tech verticals already collated in one place, our ability to respond is drastically different than it used to be."
"It has been quite helpful to have the daily alerts coming to my email, as well as the Sev 1 Alerts... We just went through a SOX audit and those were pivotal."
"The solution has a lot of different features that are quite useful."
"We like the ability of the host security module to monitor the processes running on our servers to help us monitor activity."
"It is scalable. It deploys easily with curl and yum."
"With Threat Stack, we quickly identified some AWS accounts which had services that would potentially be exposed and were able to remediate them prior to release of products."
"The capacity to respond to evidence requests from the SOX auditors has significantly improved because of this tool."
"Finally, Threat Stack has cut down on the time needed to investigate potential attacks by about 75 percent."
 

Cons

"One of the things that could be improved is the alerts. Qualys is a fantastic tool, especially with the TruRisk feature, but one challenge that most leaders face involves alert fatigue."
"TotalCloud could improve the classification of vulnerabilities. Specifically, it could enhance the categorization of what aspects fall under patches resolved by OS or software updates and what pertains to configuration adjustments."
"Overall, we are satisfied with it. However, the response part of the Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) module can be improved. It is not yet in place according to requirements; it is not completely available even though the module has been released."
"One thing that could be improved is the user experience and navigation."
"Regarding improvements to Qualys TotalCloud, I suggest that user navigation can be enhanced because initially, many users found it complicated and had trouble understanding the platform due to information being spread across multiple tabs."
"A feature improvement could be the inclusion of Windows OS support for container security, as it is currently only supported for Linux."
"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."
"Their support could be improved."
"I do see that some features associated with the IAST part are not included in the tool, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The solution lacks features when compared to some of the competitors such as Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and has room for improvement."
"The solution's visibility and vulnerability prevention should be improved."
"The deprecation of APIs is a concern since the deprecation of APIs will cause issues for us every time we upgrade."
"The solution's price could be better."
"The support and specifications need to be up to date for the cluster technologies"
"The testing process could be improved."
"The documentation about Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security available online is very limited... So it's very limited to the documentation."
"Some features do not work as expected."
"The API - which has grown quite a bit, so we're still learning it and I can't say whether it still needs improvement - was an area that had been needing it."
"They could give a few more insights into security groups and recommendations on how to be more effective. That's getting more into the AWS environment, specifically. I'm not sure if that's Threat Stack's plan or not, but I would like them to help us be efficient about how we're setting up security groups. They could recommend separation of VPCs and the like - really dig into our architecture. I haven't seen a whole lot of that and I think that's something that, right off the bat, could have made us smarter."
"They could give a few more insights into security groups and recommendations on how to be more effective."
"The one thing that we know they're working on, but we don't have through the tool, is the application layer. As we move to a serverless environment, with AWS Fargate or direct Lambda, that's where Threat Stack does not have the capacity to provide feed. Those are areas that it's blind to now..."
"It shoots back a lot of alerts."
"The solution’s ability to consume alerts and data in third-party tools (via APIs and export into S3 buckets) is moderate. They have some work to do in that area... The API does not mimic the features of the UI as far as reporting and pulling data out go. There's a big discrepancy there."
"I would like further support of Windows endpoint agents or the introduction of support for Windows endpoint agents."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"TotalCloud's price is about right where I would expect it to be."
"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."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers cost-effective licensing flexibility."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers competitive pricing given its comprehensive suite of features, including integration, assessment, remediation, and detection capabilities, all within a single platform."
"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive."
"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 is expensive, but it offers a premier solution with no headaches."
"It's a costly solution"
"We purchase a yearly basis license for the solution."
"The pricing model is moderate, meaning it is not very expensive."
"The price of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes is better than Palo Alto Prisma."
"Red Hat offers two pricing options for their solution: a separate price, and a bundled price under the OpenShift Platform Plus."
"It came in cheaper than Trend Micro when we purchased it a few years ago."
"Pricing seems to be in line with the market structure. It's fine."
"We find the licensing and pricing very easy to understand and a good value for the services provided."
"I'm happy with the amount that we spend for the product that we get and the overall service that we get. It's not cheap, but I'm still happy with the spend."
"It is a cost-effective choice versus other solutions on the market."
"What we're paying now is somewhere around $15 to $20 per agent per month, if I recall correctly. The other cost we have is SecOps."
"It is very expensive compared to some other products. The pricing is definitely high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
18%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
16%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise38
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise2
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qualys TotalCloud?
We purchased Qualys TotalCloud for GCP and Azure as well. It is comparatively better than others regarding pricing. T...
What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
I am unsure about how Qualys TotalCloud can be improved. I do not have anything else to add about the needed improvem...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
My main use case for Qualys TotalCloud is telemetry, although I am unsure about the specifics. A quick specific examp...
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
StackRox
Threat Stack, CSP,
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
City National Bank, U.S. Department of Homeland Security
StatusPage.io, Walkbase, Spanning, DNAnexus, Jobcase, Nextcapital, Smartling, Veracode, 6sense
Find out what your peers are saying about Wiz, SentinelOne, Palo Alto Networks and others in Container Security. Updated: October 2026.
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