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AWS WAF vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 26, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
Cloudflare users experienced increased performance, security, and cost-effectiveness, leading to improved loyalty and revenue despite difficult ROI calculations.
Sentiment score
6.7
AWS WAF provides valuable security by preventing hacks, enhancing satisfaction, and ensuring financial benefits despite its cost.
Sentiment score
7.3
Prisma Cloud enhances security and efficiency, reducing risks and response times, offering significant value despite initial costs.
WordPress security can be tricky, and that's where Cloudflare can be absolutely helpful for small businesses.
For the small project I was working on, using the basic tier provided a huge improvement at zero cost.
In terms of return on investment with Cloudflare, it costs my time to set them up, but basically once they're set up, it's done.
It eliminates the need for additional hardware, making it a financially and technically sound investment.
Reputation and data security are the two most important things to a financial institution.
We may have prevented a security breach with remediation of the findings.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Cloudflare's customer service is quick, but technical support feedback is mixed, with improvement needed in responsiveness and detailed assistance.
Sentiment score
6.6
AWS WAF support is generally good, but experiences vary, with enterprise users more satisfied than others.
Sentiment score
7.1
Prisma Cloud support is praised for responsiveness, though some report slow responses and varying support quality across regions.
This would help us address issues promptly, especially during unforeseen events like DDoS attacks.
Cloudflare does not offer hands-on technical support to fix customer problems but rather a self-service model.
I would rate the technical support with Cloudflare as excellent every time I've had to call them.
Resolving issues can take time because the support personnel may lack product expertise, leading to delays.
They can respond with technical documentation or pass on the case to the next level because it requires the development of a new feature or changing a feature due to a bug.
Their technical support comes up with good solutions for every difficulty we face.
Their technical support comes up with great solutions.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Users praise Cloudflare for seamless scalability, effective traffic management, easy upgrades, and robust global infrastructure without disruptions.
Sentiment score
7.8
AWS WAF is highly scalable and adaptable, popular among companies despite some integration challenges, especially for cloud environments.
Sentiment score
7.8
Prisma Cloud scales well across environments, integrates seamlessly, and automates operations, though costs rise with increased licenses.
It is a SaaS tool, but the fact that they have workloads deployed across the world proves that it is a highly scalable tool.
The tool offers very good performance, even during high-traffic periods.
I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.
It's very scalable and very easy to use.
The scalability is also a 10 out of 10.
We are growing extremely quickly, and Prisma Cloud provides all the required services without any need for us to do anything to scale.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Cloudflare is highly rated for stability and uptime, with few past issues, especially on higher-tier plans.
Sentiment score
8.3
AWS WAF is highly stable, reliable, with minor customization hiccups, praised for supporting secure and stable applications.
Sentiment score
8.0
Prisma Cloud offers reliable performance and stability, effectively handling environments with rare interruptions and quickly resolved issues.
For DDoS protection, I would not recommend Cloudflare.
I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.
The service is very stable with no impacts during high-traffic periods.
In terms of reliability, I would rate AWS WAF about six out of ten due to the need for improved signature sets.
We faced issues with AWS WAF when writing the custom rules.
I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.
Prisma Cloud is a stable platform.
The solution is stable and is capable of covering large enterprises.
 

Room For Improvement

Enhancements needed in Cloudflare: analytics, CDN latency, API integration, user support, DNS, pricing, documentation, server coverage, WAF, and cache.
AWS WAF requires improvements in automation, integration, user interface, cost management, and advanced threat detection with AI.
Prisma Cloud needs improvements in documentation, UI, automation, integrations, pricing, and support, with challenges in compliance and cloud support.
There's a need for improvement in areas like AI-based DDoS attacks and Layer 7 WAF features.
Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor.
Areas like how assessment, discovery, and payload are dealt with and how it all comes into your organization can be considered when trying to make suggestions to Cloudflare for improvements.
Compared to firewalls, WAFs generally provide limited stateful analysis capabilities.
The way we see it now is just mentioned as a percentage from bots and actual users, which should include proper graphs and detailed information.
Features like bot protection or DDoS mitigation, available with other WAF vendors, do not come natively with AWS WAF.
From a developer's perspective, especially for organizations like banks developing their applications, ensuring API security before deploying them to the cloud is crucial.
Prisma Cloud is an excellent tool.
Even though documentation was available, it took a while for a new person to understand what integration meant, what will be achieved after the integration, or how the integration needed to be done on the Azure or AWS side.
 

Setup Cost

Cloudflare offers scalable pricing, from free to enterprise plans, providing significant value especially for mid-sized companies.
AWS WAF offers flexible pay-as-you-go pricing, seen as cost-effective by many, though high-traffic costs can rise.
Prisma Cloud is expensive but valued for comprehensive security, flexible licensing, and potential cost savings in multi-cloud environments.
That's where Cloudflare shines for smaller businesses – it's ten times cheaper than Akamai.
I find it to be cheap.
The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive.
Due to our status as an AWS shop, AWS WAF is cost-effective for us, and we benefit from discounts due to our extensive use of AWS services.
The licensing cost for AWS WAF is just pay-as-you-go; it is a service-based model.
The cost was not on the higher side.
That's why a lot of our clients are shifting from cloud-native to Prisma Cloud: because of its effectiveness and because it is budget-friendly as well.
The solution is very expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Cloudflare enhances performance and security with CDN caching, DDoS protection, and an easy-to-use dashboard, benefiting many users.
AWS WAF provides scalable, cloud-native security with customizable features to protect applications from threats, including OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities.
Prisma Cloud enhances security with dynamic identity creation, compliance management, and integration across AWS and CI/CD pipelines.
The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security.
Techniques like minification and image compression reduce the size of assets, leading to better performance and faster user load times.
The solution has been able to compare it to the market, and I think the product has taken great strides in automating quite a bit of things, and they use a lot of AI.
The biggest benefit of AWS WAF for us is to filter malicious requests, so we can protect our environment and application from malicious actors.
The cloud-native nature of AWS is crucial since most of our workload is in AWS, making AWS WAF native to Amazon Web Services.
AWS WAF is not stateful, it offers a time-saving solution with its custom rulesets that enhance security and simplify management.
What I like most about Prisma Cloud is its zero-day signatures, maximum security, minimal downtime, cloud visibility, control, and ease of deployment.
All five modules are taking a preventative approach to the security of the cloud environment, from the network to the cloud, posture management and workload protection.
We use it with multi-cloud environments, and there are five cloud providers supported, including Amazon Web Services, Oracle, GCP, Azure, and Alibaba.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cloudflare
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
77
Ranking in other categories
CDN (1st), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (1st), Managed DNS (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th)
AWS WAF
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (2nd)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
111
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (8th), Container Security (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (2nd)
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Alam Hernandez Baruch - PeerSpot reviewer
Fast and secure deployments simplify operations for government and fintech clients
It is a fast and secure DNS. It is very easy to deploy, and my customers are happy with this tool. Additionally, the CDN performance in Mexico is excellent, providing fast service and tools. It offers reliability during high-traffic periods, ensuring no impact on the environment. It helps my clients avoid using on-premise boxes, simplifying operations as they only use the prices on Cloudflare.
Azam S M - PeerSpot reviewer
Has successfully filtered malicious traffic and allowed country-specific access controls
For improvement in AWS WAF, we can have better monitoring. One of the things that should be improved in AWS WAF is the monitoring; we need to identify the requests and where they are coming from. If it's a bot, we should differentiate the requests, whether they are automated or not. The way we see it now is just mentioned as a percentage from bots and actual users, which should include proper graphs and detailed information. We also need a feature where we can filter specific requests. If there are scripts in the requests, we should be able to filter those requests to see if there are any scripts running from them.
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.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business46
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise25
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise55
 

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?
Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...
Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...
What do you like most about Cloudflare?
Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.
What are the limitations of AWS WAF vs alternative WAFs?
Hi Varun, I have had experienced with several WAF deployments and deep technical assessments of the following: 1. Im...
How does AWS WAF compare to Microsoft Azure Application Gateway?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether Amazon’s Web Service Web Application Firewall or Microsoft...
What do you like most about AWS WAF?
The most valuable feature of AWS WAF is its highly configurable rules system.
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

Cloudflare DNS
AWS Web Application Firewall
Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.
eVitamins, 9Splay, Senao International
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 AWS WAF vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,778 professionals have used our research since 2012.