Cisco Secure Workload vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

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 13.8% mindshare in the category. Palo Alto Networks is ranked #1 in CNAP , with an average rating of 8.6, and holds a 15.6% 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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3,257 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

Read 110 Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks reviews

26,558 Views
14,607 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Cisco Secure Workload

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 29, 2025

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and Cisco Secure Workload both compete in cloud security solutions, with Prisma Cloud preferred for cost-effectiveness and support, whereas Cisco Secure Workload might appeal more with its comprehensive features.

Features: Prisma Cloud includes advanced threat detection, compliance checks, and cloud-native security capabilities. Cisco Secure Workload offers robust workload protection, extensive access controls, and superior workload visibility.

Room for Improvement: Prisma Cloud could enhance integration complexity and simplify policy management. Cisco Secure Workload might benefit from an easier setup process, reducing manual policy configurations, and improving cost transparency.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Prisma Cloud is known for its easy deployment and responsive support. In contrast, Cisco Secure Workload involves a complex setup process but compensates with detailed onboarding resources.

Pricing and ROI: Prisma Cloud is valued for offering competitive pricing reflecting high ROI on its security features, while Cisco Secure Workload’s premium pricing is justified by its advanced feature set, potentially yielding greater ROI for firms with extensive security needs.

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

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload 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

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) (13th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (9th)

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

110

Ranking in other categories

Web Application Firewall (WAF) (6th), Container Security (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (1st), 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 13.8%, up 12.4% compared to last year.
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP), holds 15.6% mindshare, down 21.0% since last year.

Cloud and Data Center Security

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

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Mohammad Qaw

Senior Security Consultant at helpag

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.

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

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

"By using Tetration insight, we are able to get the latency on our level accounts and we can determine whatever the issue is with the application latency itself."

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

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

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network."

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

"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."

"It's stable."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

"Prisma Cloud's comprehensive platform offers a range of features, including runtime security and vulnerability assessments, through its Prisma Cloud Compute component."

"The thing that I like the most is that when it comes to runtime events, whenever we see an event, we are able to look through the logs. It is pretty easy to look back through everything that took place."

"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."

"Prisma Cloud also provides the visibility and control you need, regardless of how complex or distributed your cloud environments become. It helps to simplify that complexity. Now we know what the best practices are, and if something is missing we know."

"I like Prisma's ability to integrate with other tools. We can integrate it with Jira so that when Prisma triggers an alert, it opens a ticket in Jira. That was a big selling point for the product. There's a feature called the guest custom template that allows you to trigger alerts in Jira based on the template. That can also be added as a feature on Jira."

"I would rate Prisma Cloud a ten out of ten."

"I find the CSPM area to be a more valuable and flexible feature."

"It provides good visibility and control regardless of the complexity."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pros

Cons

"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."

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

"There's room for improvement when it comes to Cisco Secure Workload. A couple of internal areas could be refined a little bit. They are trying to solve it, depending on where you suppose the agent is. Suppose you have the agent on both the server and the client, which could be the front-end server or web server connecting to the. In that case, if those two are communicating on RPC, the server can look into its configuration. It could go down and find the configuration file on the FTP server and then set the policies to it. But there are a lot of different FTP servers out there. It's also a complex case for the tool to support all FTP servers."

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

"It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge."

"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."

"I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications."

"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."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

"Sometimes, on the Azure side, there are issues. Some errors aren't being found on Prisma Cloud."

"The solution does not currently support servers for GCP."

"They should improve the user experience."

"We would like to have the detections be more contemporaneous. For example, we've seen detections of an overprivileged user or whatever it might be in any of the hundreds of Prisma policies, where there are 50 minutes of latency between the event and the alert."

"More documentation with real-world use cases would be helpful."

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

"One thing that is missing is Cloud Run runtime security—serverless. That would be great to have in the tool. It's not that easy to have Cloud Run in specific environments."

"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."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

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

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

"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 pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

"This solution is good for a company with at least 400 people that must be connected remotely. For smaller companies, it can be too expensive."

"Although the cost can be high, the value is worth the price tag."

"Prisma Cloud is more expensive than Check Point CloudGuard."

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

"I don't know a better way to do it, but their licensing is a little confusing. That's due to the breadth of different types of technologies they are trying to cover. The way you license depends on where you're securing. When they were Twistlock it was a simple licensing scheme and you could tell what you were doing. Now that they've changed that scheme with Palo Alto, it is quite confusing. It's very difficult to predict what your costs are going to be as you try to expand coverage."

"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."

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

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

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

24%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?

The product provides multiple-device integration.

See all answers

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 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

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Compared 10% of the time

Wiz vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 3% of the time

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Compared 19% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

July 2025

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Buyer's Guide

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

June 2025

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 is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

Reviews from Real Users

“The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

Cisco

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks delivers comprehensive security for cloud environments, focusing on workload protection, identity creation, and seamless AWS integration. Its cloud visibility and control, combined with thorough vulnerability scanning, help maintain robust security across multi-cloud platforms.

Prisma Cloud provides essential capabilities for cloud security posture management, container security, and compliance monitoring. Enterprises utilize it to secure cloud configurations, detect vulnerabilities, and ensure regulatory compliance, spanning AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Its runtime management, identity-based micro-segmentation, and threat detection enhance cybersecurity. Despite needing improvements in documentation, integration complexities, UI, and the need for role-based access control refinement, it remains pivotal for securing assets across cloud infrastructures, particularly with its capabilities for vulnerability scanning and CI/CD pipeline integration.

What are the key features?

Workload Identity Creation: Establishes identities for cloud workloads, enhancing security through precise access management.
Dynamic Workload Protection: Protects applications dynamically, securing resources during runtime.
Integration with AWS Products: Seamlessly integrates with AWS services, maximizing the efficiency of cloud operations.
Automated Forensics: Provides detailed insights through automated investigations and runtime mapping between containers.
Application Dependency Map: Enables compliance and asset management through comprehensive inventory functionality.

What benefits or ROI should users expect?

Proactive Threat Prevention: Enhances security measures with advanced threat detection and prevention.
Cloud Visibility and Control: Offers control across multi-cloud environments, ensuring users maintain a strong security posture.
Prevention Capabilities: Users value its ability to prevent vulnerabilities and threats effectively.
Integration Capabilities: Supports seamless integration into existing cloud infrastructures and CI/CD pipelines.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and retail, Prisma Cloud is implemented to strengthen cybersecurity measures, facilitate regulatory compliance, and enhance governance. Organizations leverage its features to secure sensitive data, monitor configurations, and integrate security processes within CI/CD workflows, ensuring robust protection across complex cloud infrastructures.

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

Cisco Secure Workload vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

March 2025

Free Report: Cisco Secure Workload vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Workload vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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