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Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 29, 2025

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

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (1st), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (11th), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (4th), Microsegmentation Software (3rd)
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. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is designed for Microsegmentation Software and holds a mindshare of 27.5%, up 24.4% 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.
Microsegmentation Software
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…
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

"I found the solution to be stable."
"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."
"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."
"From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful."
"The solution is very scalable, especially when connected to the cloud resources."
"Its deception features are great, providing a rich telemetry of lured origins, and are a great resource for any active defense strategy."
"The real bonus is the fact that we can secure applications, all the way down to the individual services, on each host. It's actually more granular security than we can get out of a traditional firewall."
"Guardicore makes its own rule set automatically, so we can work fast when creating a rule set."
"Prisma Cloud's real-time detection and monitoring of our entire system is the most useful."
"The two most valuable features are container security and the capability to discover workloads."
"It has improved the overall collaboration between SecOps and DevOps. Now, instead of asking people to do something, it is a default offering in the CI/CD. There is less manual intervention and more seamless integration. It is why we don't have many dependencies across many teams, which is definitely a better state."
"Technical support is quite helpful."
"Due to the maturity of most companies, security posture management is the most valuable feature."
"Its ease of integration is valuable because we need to get the solution out of the door quickly, so speed and ease matter."
"The CSPM and CWPP functionalities are pretty good."
"I find the CSPM area to be a more valuable and flexible feature."
 

Cons

"The dashboard needs improvement. It should be more flexible so that I can easily see what I want or need to see."
"The maps could go a bit faster. They are useful but slightly 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."
"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."
"Needs more customization of honeypots and a vaster catalog of systems able to be mimicked."
"In our version, when using the terminal server, we cannot exclude user tasks for each session."
"Guardicore Centra should incorporate automation so that we don't require to write custom scripts and APIs. The tool also has limitations on rules where it allows only sixty thousand rules. Our clients have also commented that there are too many manual clicks and effort to do changes. I think that the incorporation of automation can help our clients make changes with confidence and without the possibility of human error."
"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."
"In terms of improvement, there are some small things like hardening and making sure the Linux resources are deployed well but that's more at an operational level."
"It's not really on par with, or catering to, what other products are looking at in terms of SAST and DAST capabilities. For those, you'd probably go to the market and look at something like Veracode or WhiteHat."
"The area for improvement is less about the product and more about the upsell. If we've already agreed that we'd like your product x, y, or z, don't try to add fries to my burger. I don't need it."
"The deployment and onboarding are plug-and-play, but somewhat hard to handle in terms of integration with external operations tools. The product design isn't up to the current standard. I would recommend having higher standards in terms of integration with other tools, especially operationalized tools."
"There needs to be a mechanism that allows me to manually configure compliance more easily."
"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."
"One of the main backlogs in their development is in the area of integration. For example, we have ServiceNow in place for ticket management and Prisma Cloud is supposed to send closure emails for incidents. But from time to time, it fails to do so. We have several other mismatches between Prisma Cloud and ServiceNow."
"While the code security feature has undergone recent enhancements, there is room for improvement in terms of its cost module."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."
"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."
"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."
"The pricing is too high."
"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."
"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."
"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 customer would complain about the cost."
"The cost was not on the higher side. Overall, the cost gets recovered with its implementation."
"The purchasing process was easy and quick. It is a very economical solution."
"You can expect a premium price because it is a premium quality product by a leading supplier."
"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 licensing cost is a bit high on the compute side."
"The price is high. In the future, when there are more competitors at the same level with different clouds, maybe the position will be different."
"Our licensing fees are $18,000 USD per year."
"Prisma Cloud is a high-end enterprise solution, making it quite expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Insurance Company
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 tools like Cisco or Illumio, and so I think they are in the middle.
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 and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see mi...
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 a production interface and a server interface that are only for management. But...
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 are able to easily see where our container vulnerabilities lie and and where cl...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore
Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE
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 Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
861,481 professionals have used our research since 2012.