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Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

 

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:
 

Mindshare comparison

Microsegmentation Software
Vulnerability Management
Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)
 

Featured Reviews

KlavsThaarup - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers micro segmentation capabilities and easy to setup
It's micro-segmentation The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature. There are always areas for improvement. It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud. So that could be improved. In future releases, I would like to see more integration with other…
Bart Coddens - PeerSpot reviewer
Evolved cloud security with active monitoring but needs interface consistency
The user interface needs work. Sometimes, it is a transition from the old tool to the new CNAPP Two that I currently have, and remnants of the old environment can still be detected. I require consistency in the user interface to ensure everything is streamlined into the same look and feel. More work is needed in fine-tuning the threat data towards your CSPM and activity logs, aligning them with business intelligence, which requires a cohesive console interface. My assessment of CloudGuard CDRs in intrusion detection and threat hunting capabilities is that it still needs some work. All the threat data that comes in, you need to fine tune it a bit.
Mohammad Qaw - PeerSpot reviewer
It gives you one console to see all of your assets, review their configurations, and build your processes
Most customers use Prisma Cloud for visibility and compliance. Prisma has so many features, but many organizations do not use them. They primarily use the visibility part to connect all their cloud accounts and hosts for visibility to see if they are missing any security controls or if they have any misconfigurations. You can connect it to cloud environments such as Azure, AWS, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba, etc., or to an on-prem data center. Prisma Cloud gives you so many options to automate processes related to your daily operations. When it comes to cybersecurity, you can automate things with their existing APIs. They also have out-of-the-box integrations with many solutions. I have not seen any limitations. Everything is customizable. You can do whatever you want, defining the reporting and custom use cases. They recently updated the UI, so it's much better than before.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its visibility."
"We like the centralized management of the firewalls. Until we installed Guardicore Centra, we managed all our firewalls individually, so making changes was complicated, difficult, and time-consuming."
"The interface and dashboard are amazing."
"The tool is a complete package that offers many features like visibility. You can get a graph with real-time workflows and visibility into server-to-server communication. We get visibility into many things happening within our environment."
"The most valuable feature is the visibility of processes and connections."
"Guardicore makes its own rule set automatically, so we can work fast when creating a rule set."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the maps and ring fencing that help monitor events."
"Overall, it provides good security."
"The most valuable features of CloudGuard CNAPP are its reporting capabilities for aggregating vulnerability information and scoring."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"Assets Management as it provide complete visibility of our workload inkling EC2 instance or Serverless"
"This product provides a really nice visualization of the infrastructure, including network topology, firewalls, etc."
"The visibility in our cloud environment is the most valuable feature."
"The solution offers an excellent price, benefit, and installation relationship."
"It offers a range of features tailored to address the unique security challenges."
"Syslog CLIs are the best feature."
"The application visibility is amazing. For example, sometimes we don't know what a particular custom port is for and what is running on it. The visibility enables us to identify applications, what the protocol is, and what service is behind it. Within Azure, it is doing a great job of providing visibility. We know exactly what is passing through our network. If there is an issue of any sort we are able to quickly detect it and fix the problem."
"The most valuable feature is the closed VPN connection, which provides better performance than traditional VPN boxes. For example, let's say a user in New York State normally connects in the East, but if they travel to the UK, they can connect to the same portal, which automatically redirects to any VPN gateway. We can control traffic based on Active Directory groups instead of the user's IP. That means a user in New York can access his application based on his user ID and AD group access when he travels to the UK or anywhere else."
"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."
"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."
"Prisma Cloud has enabled us to take a very strong preventive approach to cloud security. One of the hardest things with cloud is getting visibility into workloads. With Prisma Cloud, you can go in and get that visibility, then set up policies to alert on risky behavior, e.g., if there are security groups or firewall ports open up. So, it is very helpful in preventing configuration errors in the cloud by having visibility. If there are issues, then you can find them and fix them."
"I've been really pleasantly surprised with how Prisma Cloud is, over time, covering more and more of the topics I care about, and listening to customer feedback and growing the product in the right directions."
"What I found most valuable in Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is the VAS, such as the web application and API security. I feel that VAS adds a lot of value, mainly because it gives visibility through the application layer and threat detection features."
 

Cons

"Sometimes, the speed needs improvement, especially when it comes to the generation of maps, where it can be a bit slow."
"Clients would like to see that the security policies of GuardiCore can continue to be comparable to all the major firewall players out there."
"Needs more customization of honeypots and a vaster catalog of systems able to be mimicked."
"It would be very helpful for beginners if the solution had more windows to help with the terms inside instead of going to the documentation."
"Customers would want to see the cost improved."
"It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud."
"The long-term management of the security policies could be improved with some kind of automation platform, something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, to help you manage the policies after day-one... to then manage the policies and changes to those policies, going forward, through some type of automation process is not turning out to be really easy."
"They can maybe improve their customer service just because they are kind of a small organization, and customer service isn't as big as others such as VMware."
"I’d like to see more integration with third-party tools. For example, it would be helpful to have an integration between Dome9 and ServiceNow to manage security incidents and security changes."
"The support it provides is not very good. They should improve it since we have had several setbacks due to support issues."
"Their service needs improvement."
"The user interface needs work. Sometimes, it is a transition from the old tool to the new CNAPP Two that I currently have, and remnants of the old environment can still be detected."
"Scalability, particularly in workload protection, is an area that needs improvement."
"Streamlining the user interface would greatly improve the user experience."
"No improvements are needed."
"The dashboard customization has room for improvement."
"The innovation side of the solution could be more efficient and more detailed."
"The UI could use some improvement; we usually find the information we're looking for, but what fields can be clicked on and what workflow to follow to get the required information is not always evident. Sometimes we're all over the place, clicking around to drill in and uncover the alert and investigation details we're looking for."
"Prisma Cloud's enterprise reporting needs significant improvement."
"The visibility on the SIEM needs to be streamlined so we can get the data without any issues."
"The automation capabilities are growing each day, but the problem is that the updates are not that frequent. There are some services on Amazon that have come out with updates, and Azure is also getting up to date. But Prisma takes some time to follow. There's a time gap that Prisma inherits from these clouds. I understand why it takes some time, but that time should be reduced."
"The training documentation provided for the two-hour boot camps is notoriously poor and disorganized."
"Sometimes, when you assign subnets to regions, the IP address will jump from one location to another because it will automatically change substantially. Then, we need to add those IP subnets to our firewall for existing access. The need to update those subnets potentially causes maintenance or access issues. So far, we can only provide bigger customers with six subnets, and a small company may not be able to access those services."
"When there are updates, whether daily, weekly, or monthly, it needs configuration or permission adjustments. There is no automation for that, which is too bad."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."
"The solution is reasonably priced and I would rate it a six out of ten. The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."
"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."
"The customer would complain about the cost."
"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."
"The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."
"The pricing is too high."
"In the beginning, the price of Dome9 was cheap, whereas now it is not."
"The licensing part still needs some work. The issue that I have is that we do not use all the services in the cloud, but sometimes, CloudGuard identifies them as an asset."
"We have the enterprise-level license and we renew it annually because it is worth the cost."
"It is a very straightforward licensing model that is based on the number of assets you are discovering and managing with the solution."
"I would advise taking into account the existing number of devices and add a forecast of the number of devices to be added in the coming year or two, to obtain better pricing."
"Right now, we have licenses on 500 machines, and they are not cheap."
"The price is on the higher end."
"Licensing and costs are straightforward, as they have a baseline of 100 workloads within one license and no additional charges."
"Prisma Cloud licensing works on credits."
"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."
"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."
"If you pay for three years of Palo Alto, it's better. If you're planning on doing this, it's obviously not going to be for one year, so it's better if you go with a three-year license... The only challenge we have is with the public cloud vendor pricing. The biggest lesson I have learned is around the issues related to pricing for public cloud. So when you are doing your segmentation and design, it is extremely important that you work with someone who knows and understands what kinds of needs you will have in the future and how what you are doing will affect you in terms of costs."
"Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks has helped the company save some money. Cost-wise, it's okay."
"We are encountering some resistance in the African market regarding the cost of Prisma Cloud."
"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."
"The product is very expensive, but the cost is a necessary evil; I don't know how we could have any kind of cloud presence without this type of monitoring. The pricing is calculated by module and resource usage. Ultimately, it saves us money in the amount of time we would spend uncovering what it uncovers, and we might not make the required discoveries without it anyway. Prisma offers incredible value, though I wish it were cheaper."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Guardicore Centra?
I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. I know other micro-segmentation t...
What do you like most about Guardicore Infection Monkey?
Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy ...
What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?
When we have more than one interface, we can only have one policy for both interfaces. Normally, you have assets with...
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...
 

Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore
Check Point CloudGuard Posture Management, Dome9, Check Point CloudGuard Workload Protection, Check Point CloudGuard Intelligence
Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE
Symantec, Citrix, Car and Driver, Virgin, Cloud Technology Partners
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 VMware, Illumio, Akamai and others in Microsegmentation Software. Updated: July 2025.
865,140 professionals have used our research since 2012.