Amazon Inspector vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

The compared Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Palo Alto Networks solutions aren't in the same category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #22 in VM , with an average rating of 8.6, and holds a 1.3% mindshare in the category. Palo Alto Networks is ranked #2 in CNAP , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 11.0% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of Palo Alto Networks users who would recommend it.

Amazon Inspector

Read 9 Amazon Inspector reviews

3,337 Views
2,903 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

Read 114 Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks reviews

25,768 Views
12,626 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Amazon Inspector

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 11, 2026

Prisma Cloud and Amazon Inspector compete in the cybersecurity category, focusing on cloud workload protection and vulnerability management. Prisma Cloud appears to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive features and extensive cloud environment support.

Features: Prisma Cloud offers dynamic workload identity creation, real-time container scanning, and serverless function monitoring. It integrates well with AWS and supports multi-cloud environments, providing holistic security management with components like RedLock, Twistlock, and PureSec. Amazon Inspector excels in automated vulnerability detection across EC2 instances, container images, and serverless functions, offering a consolidated view for issue management.

Room for Improvement: Prisma Cloud needs better documentation with real-world examples and enhanced visibility in security checks. Users also seek improved UI, cost transparency, and stronger API security. Amazon Inspector requires broader scanning capabilities and enhanced automation features, with users asking for better integration with patching services in AWS.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Prisma Cloud supports hybrid, on-premises, and multi-cloud environments with generally positive customer service, though assistance may be needed for setup. Amazon Inspector simplifies deployment within AWS but limits support to AWS-related queries, often requiring third-party tools for extended features.

Pricing and ROI: Prisma Cloud's pricing, seen as expensive, covers comprehensive security capabilities with resource-based licensing, presenting challenges in navigation. ROI is recognized through security improvements, though direct savings are less clear. Amazon Inspector's tiered, pay-per-scan model is cost-effective, providing clear ROI in enhanced vulnerability management within AWS.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Inspector vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Inspector vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

March 2025

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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

Amazon Inspector

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Vulnerability Management (22nd), IT Vendor Risk Management (6th)

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) (9th), Container Security (2nd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Amazon Inspector is designed for Vulnerability Management and holds a mindshare of 1.3%, down 2.5% compared to last year.
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP), holds 11.0% mindshare, down 17.3% since last year.

Vulnerability Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Amazon Inspector	1.3%
Wiz	5.0%
Qualys VMDR	4.2%
Other	89.5%

Vulnerability Management

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks	11.0%
Wiz	13.8%
Microsoft Defender for Cloud	8.1%
Other	67.1%

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)

Featured Reviews

Abdalla Kenawy

AWS DevOps SRE/Infrastructure Engineer at Capgemini

Automated insights streamline data security assessment

For Amazon Inspector, we have many EC2 or virtual machines deployed inside our AWS environment, and the problem is that the existing package deployed inside this EC2 instance has already outdated packages. As we progress with time, this package needs to be updated for security enhancement, which requires us to uninstall the package, install the new version, and then we should be fine. However, the challenge comes with how to scan all our EC2 instances for security vulnerabilities, which is currently managed by Amazon Inspector. Amazon Inspector can scan EC2 instances or ECR, which is the ECR registry where we can save artifacts Docker images. Amazon Inspector can also scan Docker images uploaded to ECR for Elastic Registry service, and it can scan databases and S3 based on the latest updates. I noticed this from a couple of months ago, and it provides huge benefits for security. Regarding the best features of Amazon Inspector, it gives us a list of all existing outdated packages as part of a deployed package on EC2 instances or specific Python packages that are part of the Docker file and the Docker image itself, which are causing security concerns. Amazon Inspector can list these security concerns and offer guidance on how we can remediate it by updating the package to a specific upper version or something similar.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It operates continuously, so as soon as resources are created, it scans them for vulnerabilities."

"The findings dashboards are neat and easy to understand, offering clear demarcations for different types of findings and detailed insights into specific vulnerabilities and their associated instances. It is not a place where everything is dumped together. It offers an easy-to-understand layout."

"Amazon Inspector is highly stable, rated ten out of ten, and this stability impacts business security and administration positively."

"I recommend Amazon Inspector because it allows the automation of processes and requires less manual monitoring."

"The vulnerability discovery is valuable, and they also rank those vulnerabilities for you. So, you could rapidly attack some of the higher, severe vulnerabilities as they pop up, if they do pop up."

"The automated vulnerability detection aspect is most valuable."

"It is scanning the whole repository for any sort of vulnerabilities, so it allows us to be more confident in our DevSecOps and not put a lot of folks or attention to it."

"The scalability of the solution itself is unparalleled."

More Amazon Inspector pros

"The CVEs are valuable because we used to have a tool to scan CVEs, at the language level, for the dependencies that our developers had. What is good about Prisma Cloud is that the CVEs are not only from the software layer, but from all layers: the language, the base image, and you also have CVEs from the host. It covers the full base of security."

"Prisma Cloud's monitoring features such as the compute compliance dashboard and the vulnerability dashboard, where we can get a clear visualization of their docker, have also been valuable. We can get layer-by-layer information that helps us see exactly where it's noncompliant. They update the dashboards quite frequently."

"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."

"Visibility and control are the most utilized features. A dashboard is available to us where we can view different categories. We can see any IAM-related risks, any discovered vulnerabilities, any incidents, or any network-level issues."

"The solution offers very good configuration capabilities."

"We haven't had an issue with the product for over a year."

"With Prisma Cloud, I can just select 30 AWS accounts, generate one report, and I've got everything I need to know, out-of-the-box."

"Prisma Cloud stands out as a user-friendly and powerful CSPM solution thanks to its comprehensive capabilities, built-in features, and flexible tagging system."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pros

Cons

"The other point is that the reporting features of Inspector need improvement. For example, I am in an organization with millions of CVEs, and getting an overview of all this is challenging."

"There is room for improvement in the scanning capabilities. I'd like to see broader coverage in terms of the vulnerabilities detected."

"It has a limited scope. So, AWS Inspector primarily focuses on the security of the EC2 instance. So, if your architecture includes other AWS services, then you may need to use additional tools for your comprehensive security assessment. So that is one con. Another is, like, we have a dependency on agents."

"The most challenging aspect I faced with Amazon Inspector during integration was automating the remediation process."

"One area for improvement in Amazon Inspector is the automation aspect."

"The false positive rate of Amazon Inspector is a little high, and it is not covering all different applications and scanning."

"It has automated vulnerability assessment, yet I seek more flexibility in defining custom vulnerability checks tailored to my needs, which is more difficult."

"There isn't too much to improve right now. Scanning on demand or as a part of the pipeline versus a post pipeline solution would be good, but it is not a deal breaker by any means."

More Amazon Inspector cons

"There is room for improvement on the logging and monitoring front because it's still not as holistic as I would want it to be."

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

"Based on my experience, the customization—especially the interface and some of the product identification components—is not as customizable as it could be."

"One major observation is that it is not possible to implement Prisma Cloud on-premises. This is the limitation. Prisma Cloud itself is on a cloud. It is sitting on AWS and Google Cloud. It is a SaaS solution, but some of my clients have a local regulatory requirement, and they want to install it locally on their premises. That capability is not there, but government entities and ministries want to have Prisma Cloud installed locally."

"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."

"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."

"While Prisma provides a lot of visibility, it also creates a ton of work."

"The initial setup was very complex."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The lowest cost would be around $10 for a few small accounts, however, for thousands of accounts, it could be around $5000 to $6000 dollars per month."

"It's priced according to market standards for its services."

"It is scaled as you go. There are probably a certain number of scans per month, and there are tiers. If you're under a certain tier, it is free. The second level is pennies, and then all the way up to like a million. So, it has a tiered pricing program. They're pretty good with your initial scanning, and there is room to scale based on being affordable, but it is fairly cheap. There are no additional costs. They pretty much think about it as a pay-per-scan type model."

"The pricing is very transparent and clear."

"The price for Prisma Cloud is reasonable."

"Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is a highly expensive solution."

"The pricing is competitive. From what I have seen in the past, it is on par with the others."

"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."

"The pricing structure is easy to understand. Depending on the use case the pricing of the solution can be different. There are not any additional costs to the standard living fees."

"The pricing is competitive; for the most part, the security firms have similar prices."

"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."

"In general, Prisma Cloud is much cheaper than cloud-native services."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	38
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	57

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Inspector?

I am not honestly sure about the pricing side of Amazon Inspector, but that is taken care of by a separate team. I believe it's cheaper than the other third-party solutions.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Inspector?

They might launch support for third-party environments in the next version regarding the best features in Amazon Inspector from my perspective. The false positive rate of Amazon Inspector is a litt...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon Inspector?

I mostly use Amazon Inspector for vulnerability scanning on AWS native applications. For hybrid applications, we have different security scanners.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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 are able to easily see where our container vulnerabilities lie and and where cl...

See all answers

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 valuable feature and their speed of integration is very good. The initial setup was ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Tenable Nessus vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 8% of the time

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 8% of the time

Rapid7 Metasploit vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 7% of the time

Wiz vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon Inspector Competitors

Wiz 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

Cyera vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 6% of the time

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 4% of the time

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Inspector

May 2026

Download Amazon Inspector product report

Buyer's Guide

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

April 2026

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report

Download Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks product report

Also Known As

No data available

Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto

Overview

Amazon Inspector offers automated vulnerability detection, scanning AWS workloads and recommending remediation, ensuring enhanced security without constant supervision.

Amazon Inspector provides advanced automated vulnerability assessments, specifically designed for AWS environments. It scans EC2 instances, ECR, and container images for vulnerabilities, ranking them by priority. With capabilities like integration with CloudTrail and CloudWatch, adherence to compliance benchmarks, and a comprehensive view for diverse resources, it supports continuous detection and detailed reporting. Users can schedule regular scans, maintaining strong security oversight. Current feedback highlights a need for improved scanning of EBS, S3, and EFS, as well as expanded databases and better patch integration.

What features make Amazon Inspector stand out?

Automated Vulnerability Assessments: Detects and prioritizes vulnerabilities in AWS workloads.
Continuous Detection: Keeps an eye on EC2, ECR, and container images for ongoing risk management.
Integration Capabilities: Works with CloudTrail and CloudWatch to centralize oversight and alerts.
Compliance Adherence: Aligns with industry benchmarks for strengthened regulatory compliance.
Detailed Reporting: Provides comprehensive reports with findings and CVEs.

What benefits do users gain from Amazon Inspector?

Enhanced Security: Automates vulnerability detection, reducing manual efforts.
Efficiency: Identifies and prioritizes threats, streamlining resource allocation.
Comprehensive Oversight: Detailed reports improve understanding and response strategies.
Regulatory Compliance: Aligns with compliance standards, aiding legal adherence.

Amazon Inspector is utilized across industries, including finance, healthcare, and tech, assisting with robust security management in cloud-native environments. By integrating with services like Security Hub and SIEM, businesses maintain compliance and streamline alert management. This solution supports broader security frameworks, often paired with third-party tools to enhance protection strategies.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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

betterment, caplinked, flatiron, university of nutri dame

Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Inspector vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

March 2025

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