Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

The compared Akamai and Palo Alto Networks solutions aren't in the same category. Akamai is ranked #3 in MS , with an average rating of 7.8, and holds a 26.7% mindshare in the category. Palo Alto Networks is ranked #2 in CNAP , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 14.5% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of Palo Alto Networks users who would recommend it.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Read 18 Akamai Guardicore Segmentation reviews

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5,187 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

Read 111 Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks reviews

23,407 Views
12,406 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 5, 2025

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks compete in the security and segmentation category. Prisma Cloud appears to have the upper hand due to its expansive cloud-native security feature set, which includes auto-remediation and comprehensive multi-cloud coverage.

Features: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers granular micro-segmentation, visibility across diverse environments including legacy systems, and robust deception and threat intelligence capabilities. Prisma Cloud provides comprehensive security across multi-cloud and hybrid environments, integrating posture management, workload protection, and network security, with praised features like auto-remediation and continuous monitoring.

Room for Improvement: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation needs enhancements in cost-effectiveness, dashboard flexibility, honeypot customization, and policy management automation. Prisma Cloud requires improvements in policy creation simplicity, better environmental integration, and more intuitive automation and licensing features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation supports a wide range of environments with high customer satisfaction in technical support due to quick responsiveness. Prisma Cloud excels in public cloud integration but faces challenges in initial deployment complexity; however, its capabilities are widely recognized. The customer support for Guardicore is noted for being excellent, with quick response times, while Prisma Cloud receives mixed reviews on support responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is priced higher, yet considered valuable for its robust security insights and reduced need for personnel in complex environments. Prisma Cloud, perceived as expensive, provides flexible resource allocation through a credit-based pricing model, offering comprehensive security management from a single provider. Despite its cost, its extensive feature set often justifies the investment.

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

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation 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

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud and Data Center Security (1st), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (12th), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (6th), Microsegmentation Software (3rd)

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)

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 26.7%, up 25.9% compared to last year.
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, on the other hand, focuses on Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP), holds 14.5% mindshare, down 20.8% since last year.

Microsegmentation Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation	26.7%
Illumio	29.4%
VMware NSX	16.0%
Other	27.900000000000006%

Microsegmentation Software

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks	14.5%
Wiz	23.4%
Microsoft Defender for Cloud	10.9%
Other	51.2%

Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP)

Featured Reviews

Uday Varma

Solution Architecht at Inspira Enterprise

Offers granular control and ease of policy creation with features like telemetry and micro-segmentation but incident tagging is missing

Our customers use the solution for micro-segmentation within the data center or cloud environments. One customer uses it for their on-premises infrastructure, deployed at the code level across their massive network. Another customer uses it in a data center to monitor microsegmentation for their 500-node workload. Moreover, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has helped our customers manage and secure traffic between different applications or workloads. Earlier, they were using VMware NSX-v, which offered good logging for distributed services on an analytical level. However, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides them with better overall visibility and granular control over-segmentation, even for inter-application and inter-routing traffic.

Read full review

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

"From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful."

"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."

"The tool is a complete package that offers many features like visibility. You can get a graph with real-time workflows and visibility into server-to-server communication. We get visibility into many things happening within our environment."

"I found the solution to be stable."

"Its deception features are great, providing a rich telemetry of lured origins, and are a great resource for any active defense strategy."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the maps and ring fencing that help monitor events."

"The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature."

"Guardicore makes its own rule set automatically, so we can work fast when creating a rule set."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pros

"The most valuable features of the solution are areas like compliance and asset inventories, along with runtime protection."

"The most valuable feature is that the rule set is managed and that it can be run on a regularly scheduled basis."

"It supports the multi-cloud environment beautifully."

"The container and serverless security is most valuable. It is quite a new technology for this region. Even though containers have been there for a long time, the adoption of containers is very minimal in this region. When it comes to using Kubernetes containers in a complex architecture, there is a lack of security in the market. People aren't aware of the security controls or the process for governance. Container security provided by Prisma Cloud is quite good at filling that gap."

"Syslog CLIs are the best feature."

"Prisma Cloud's real-time detection and monitoring of our entire system is the most useful."

"Visibility is a key feature. Integration with other technologies across the board, whether they are Palo Alto technologies, Windows technologies, or cloud technologies, is probably the biggest thing."

"You can also integrate with Amazon Managed Services. You can also get a snapshot in time, whether that's over a 24-hour period, seven days, or a month, to determine what the estate might look like at a certain point in time and generate reports from that for vulnerability management forums."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"Supports become difficult when it's for a big organization. For a small organization, medium organization, it still makes sense, however, for a big organization, it makes life difficult."

"Customers would want to see the cost improved."

"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."

"It would be very helpful for beginners if the solution had more windows to help with the terms inside instead of going to the documentation."

"Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it."

"Sometimes, the speed needs improvement, especially when it comes to the generation of maps, where it can be a bit slow."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation cons

"Some module customization might be needed and certain features like adding custom labels are currently unavailable unless we have administrator access."

"The UI is the worst."

"They are missing some compatibility details in their documentation."

"Prisma Cloud's application security capabilities should be enhanced."

"I believe there are some issues with the product's maturity. In some cases, it could malfunction concerning Cloud Native."

"The dashboard can be created at the user level instead of the cloud account level, which will help save time."

"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."

"When it comes to protecting the full cloud-native stack, it has the right breadth. They're covering all the topics I would care about, like container, cloud configuration, and serverless. There's one gap. There could be a better set of features around identity management—native AWS—IAM roles, and service account management. The depth in each of those areas varies a little bit. While they may have the breadth, I think there's still work to do in flushing out each of those feature sets."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The customer would complain about the cost."

"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."

"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 pricing is too high."

"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."

"The solution is reasonably priced and I would rate it a six out of ten. The tool's licensing costs are yearly."

"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."

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pricing and cost advice

"I find the pricing to be expensive."

"Its price is reasonable as compared to other products. The main challenge is explaining the licensing model to customers. It isn't a problem related to Palo Alto. Commonly, people don't understand cloud licensing or security licensing. When they have fixed virtual machines, they know what they are going to be charged, but when it comes to cloud automation, it is hard for them to get clarity in case of high workloads or when they have enabled auto-scaling, etc. It would be helpful if Palo Alto can educate people on their licensing programs."

"You can expect a premium price because it is a premium quality product by a leading supplier."

"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."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"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."

"The cost depends on the pricing model. Compared to other solutions, the cost isn't that bad."

"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

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	9

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	34
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	58

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

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 vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 45% of the time

VMware NSX vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 10% of the time

Cisco Secure Workload vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 9% of the time

Zero Networks vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 2% of the time

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation Competitors

Wiz vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 14% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 10% of the time

Cyera vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 7% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 5% of the time

Aqua Cloud Security Platform 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

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

October 2025

Download Akamai Guardicore Segmentation product report

Buyer's Guide

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

October 2025

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report

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Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore

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

Overview

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is a software-based microsegmentation solution that provides the simplest, fastest, and most intuitive way to enforce Zero Trust principles. It enables you to prevent malicious lateral movement in your network through precise segmentation policies, visuals of activity within your IT environment, and network security alerts. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation works across your data centers, multicloud environments, and endpoints. It is faster to deploy than infrastructure segmentation approaches and provides you with unparalleled visibility and control of your network.

Akamai

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

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

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

March 2025

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