Cisco Secure Workload vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

Why PeerSpot?

The compared Cisco and Palo Alto Networks solutions aren't in the same category. Cisco is ranked #8 in CDCS , with an average rating of 9.5, and holds a 8.6% mindshare in the category. Palo Alto Networks is ranked #2 in CNAP , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 10.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of Palo Alto Networks users who would recommend it.

Cisco Secure Workload

Read 15 Cisco Secure Workload reviews

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3,893 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

Read 114 Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks reviews

29,312 Views
14,363 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Cisco Secure Workload

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 11, 2026

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and Cisco Secure Workload are software products competing in the cloud security solutions category. Based on data comparisons, Prisma Cloud seems to have the upper hand in customer satisfaction related to pricing and support, whereas Cisco Secure Workload features appear stronger and perceived as worth the investment.

Features: Prisma Cloud includes comprehensive security coverage such as web application and API security, identity security, and compliance monitoring. Cisco Secure Workload provides robust workload protection, micro-segmentation, and innovative threat detection capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Prisma Cloud may improve its feature set to align with feature-rich competitors. Some users suggest enhancements in integration capabilities and in-depth real-time monitoring features. Cisco Secure Workload might improve user experience with easier policy configuration, enhance scalability, and provide more detailed documentation to simplify complex deployments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Prisma Cloud offers straightforward deployment and harmonizes seamlessly with existing infrastructure, supported by solid customer service. Cisco Secure Workload, while offering sophisticated features that contribute to complex deployments, benefits from expert guidance and solutions. Those prioritizing swift deployment may favor Prisma Cloud, whereas Cisco’s services support tailored requirements effectively.

Pricing and ROI: Prisma Cloud typically provides a more competitive setup cost with efficient ROI due to its broad security coverage and resource management. Conversely, Cisco Secure Workload may have higher initial expenses, justified by its enhanced capabilities and deliverance of premium solutions targeted at specific security needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud and Data Center Security Report (Updated: August 2026).

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Cloud and Data Center Security

August 2026

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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

Cisco Secure Workload

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud and Data Center Security (8th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (18th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (8th)

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)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Cisco Secure Workload is designed for Cloud and Data Center Security and holds a mindshare of 8.6%, down 13.1% compared to last year.
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP), holds 10.2% mindshare, down 14.8% since last year.

Cloud and Data Center Security Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cisco Secure Workload	8.6%
Illumio Segmentation	13.4%
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation	11.6%
Other	66.4%

Cloud and Data Center Security

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks	10.2%
Wiz	12.0%
Microsoft Defender for Cloud	6.9%
Other	70.9%

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)

Featured Reviews

Raj Metkar

Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA

Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption

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

"The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage; the telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent, it's complete, and you see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network."

"Overall, this is a really good product and I am happy with it."

"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."

"This product does everything that you need it to do and more and does a lot to provide visibility in a network environment, save time and money, and make the organization IT operate in a much more streamlined fashion."

"The only use case I can see that makes sense is micro-segmentation. I think there are other use cases for it. The main purpose of the product is to do micro-segmentation by collecting IP. That could be done by installing an agent, and then you have all the communication coming in and out. You could also use some flow sensors installed in the network that receive a copy of the traffic and then report that back to the system."

"The most valuable feature is micro-segmentation, which is the most important with respect to visibility."

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

"The support is excellent."

"The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is the CSPM, which we use the most. Additionally, the investigation and alerts are useful, and the creation of queries."

"Engineering is thinking it's easy to integrate because we use many Red Hat products."

"The UI is very good. We get all the things within a single UI."

"The CSPM and CWPP functionalities are pretty good."

"Overall, the Palo Alto solution is extremely good for helping us take a preventative approach to cloud security."

"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."

"What I appreciate about Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is the agentless feature, which means we do not have to deploy agents."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pros

Cons

"The scalability of this solution needs to be improved."

"The interface is really helpful for technical people, but it is not user-friendly."

"A feature that I was looking for was emailed alerts and notifications so we'd get them right away."

"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and there are few DC tools, it would be great to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."

"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes."

"The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved."

"Secure Workload is a little complicated to use, and the dashboard isn't intuitive, so it takes a while to learn how to use it."

"It has an uninviting interface."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

"They should improve the user experience."

"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."

"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."

"When an account is onboarded, if it is missing any permission, it should automatically be updated with the required permissions and policies."

"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."

"A better correlation between the multiple products Prisma Cloud contains would be crucial. It would reduce the time spent looking at reports and enable you to get all the actionable insights across products. I think that Palo Alto is working on it, but they need to work faster because it doesn't make sense to have all these products in a single pane of glass without any correlation between them."

"It provides all the cloud details but is not entirely linked to the compute model."

"Technical support could use some improvement."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."

"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."

"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."

"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."

"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."

"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."

"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."

"Almost all the CSPM tools are pretty expensive."

"I wouldn't mind if it were cheaper. We are spending a fair amount of money on Prisma Cloud."

"The Prisma Cloud pricing is good."

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

"The purchasing process was easy and quick. It is a very economical solution."

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

"The price for Prisma Cloud is reasonable."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	37
Midsize Enterprise	21
Large Enterprise	58

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?

CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discovery. This raises questions about the resources required to discover and write po...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Workload?

When we onboarded Cisco Secure Workload, the usual use case was to discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map for Cisco ACI. As the network team, we chose to implement A...

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

Illumio Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 13% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 12% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 7% of the time

BMC Helix Cloud Security vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 5% of the time

Wiz vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 2% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Wiz vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 12% of the time

Check Point Cloud Firewall (formerly CloudGuard Network Security) vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 7% of the time

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 3% of the time

TrendAI Vision One – Cloud Security vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 3% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 3% of the time

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

September 2026

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Buyer's Guide

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

September 2026

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report

Download Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks product report

Also Known As

Cisco Tetration

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

Overview

Cisco Secure Workload offers advanced auditing, micro-segmentation, and network visibility, automating policy presentation for improved security. It enhances application dependency mapping and provides comprehensive telemetry with strategic policy enforcement.

Cisco Secure Workload specializes in automating micro-segmentation, data center management, and traffic analysis. Its capabilities facilitate application dependency mapping and enhance internal micro-segmentation, providing invaluable network visibility. Users find its automation in policy presentation and strategic enforcement beneficial, along with granular control and scalability, despite needing improvements in scalability and integration capabilities. Enhanced notification features, troubleshooting options, and an efficient interface are desired for seamless deployment, along with stronger multi-tenancy, redundancy, and monitoring functions. Broader platform support and integrated cloud connectivity are desired for unified management across tools.

What are the most important features?

Auditing: Provides in-depth network analysis and security auditing capabilities.
Micro-Segmentation: Enhances network security by automating segmentation at a granular level.
Application Dependency Mapping: Visualizes connections and interactions between applications.
Network Visibility: Delivers comprehensive insight into network activities and dynamics.
Policy Discovery: Streamlines policy creation through automation and reduces manual intervention.
Comprehensive Telemetry: Offers complete coverage and insights for better security assessment.

What benefits and ROI should be evaluated?

Enhanced Security Measures: Offers robust features for network security improvement.
Automated Processes: Reduces manual efforts through automation, increasing efficiency.
Scalability: Adapts to growing network demands with flexible scalability options.
Granular Control: Allows detailed control over network policies and enforcement.

Entities in finance, gas, and oil sectors utilize Cisco Secure Workload for networking site management and compliance maintenance. It integrates into extensive Cisco infrastructure, aiding routers, switches, and endpoints, thus supporting auditors in network synchronization and auditing needs.

Cisco

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

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

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

Buyer's Guide

Cloud and Data Center Security

August 2026

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