Imperva Web Application Firewall vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

Imperva and Palo Alto Networks are both solutions in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category. Imperva is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.8, while Palo Alto Networks is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.6. Imperva holds a 5.8% mindshare in WAF, compared to Palo Alto Networks’s 2.1% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Imperva users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of Palo Alto Networks users who would recommend it.

Imperva Web Application Fir...

Read 52 Imperva Web Application Firewall reviews

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97% willing to recommend

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

Read 110 Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks reviews

2,222 Views
1,111 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Imperva Web Application Fir...

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on May 25, 2025

Imperva Web Application Firewall and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks compete in the cloud and application security segments. Prisma Cloud appears to have the upper hand due to its wider range of cloud-native security capabilities and support for multi-cloud environments, which can be more suitable for organizations with complex infrastructure needs.

Features: Imperva Web Application Firewall offers features such as correlated attack validation, threat radar, and virtual patching. Its ease of deployment and API security are notable, along with advanced protection capabilities including signature-based blocking and out-of-the-box detection. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks provides dynamic workload identity, compliance mapping, and runtime monitoring. It excels in integrating security into DevOps processes, with built-in automation for comprehensive cloud-native security across multi and hybrid-cloud environments.

Room for Improvement: Imperva Web Application Firewall could benefit from enhancing its GUI simplicity and improving integration capabilities. Users also report a need for better visibility into real-time traffic and more effective alert systems. Prisma Cloud requires enhancements in its UI, role access customization, and automation capabilities. Improvements in detection speed and better multi-cloud integration are also necessary alongside more granular permission models and performance in rapid updates.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Imperva Web Application Firewall is praised for its versatility in deployment across different cloud infrastructures and generally positive customer service, with room for improvement in localized support. Prisma Cloud is noted for its comprehensive support in public and hybrid cloud deployments, although it occasionally struggles with response times compared to Imperva. Imperva provides more regional support options, whereas Prisma Cloud's main advantage is its deployment flexibility.

Pricing and ROI: Both Imperva Web Application Firewall and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks are considered premium offerings. Despite perceived high costs, Imperva delivers a high ROI through effective DDoS attack mitigation and application-level security. Prisma Cloud justifies its price with extensive features supporting cloud-native applications. Users find both products complex in terms of licensing but recognize substantial value derivation in protecting diverse cloud environments.

To learn more, read our detailed Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

June 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 856,873 peers since 2012

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

Imperva Web Application Fir...

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

7th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)

5th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

110

Ranking in other categories

Container Security (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (1st), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Imperva Web Application Firewall is 5.8%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is 2.1%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Featured Reviews

Mitesh D Patel

Senior Technical Consultant- Cyber Security at Ivalue Infosolution

Effectively defends against threats like cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and others

It does bring value. For example, consider a BFSI customer. Their application is critical and represents their brand. Without a WAF, an attack could take their application down, harming their reputation. It leads to hampering the customer's workflow. With an Imperva WAF, they protect against attacks like DDoS or SQL injection, ensuring their application remains available and customers are happy. That's the main benefit for both the customer and the organization. The impact depends on the customer's use case. If their business primarily operates online, a CDN is beneficial for traffic optimization. Moreover, the integration options depend on the specific use case of our customers. Generally, integration capabilities are good with SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) parts.

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

"If you are using the appliance as opposed to the virtual deployment, it can stand as the network layer-two and provide real transparency."

"The solution has been quite stable. I have not seen any bugs at all."

"The configurability of the tools and the ease of operation to be the most valuable feature of Imperva."

"Very scalable and very stable firewall for web applications, with a good interface in its cloud version. Mitigation is its most valuable feature. The technical support for this product is also good."

"Learning mode and custom policies are helpful features."

"There is a quick switch between any of the the nodes if something goes wrong, where there's a there's an attack against a specific area. The security setup is reasonably easy. It's not a problem to do setups and rules and integrations. And, yeah, just the the back end team is also very willing to insist if there's questions that that we cannot answer or with these questions that we do have"

"The most valuable features of Imperva Web Application Firewall are the monitoring of databases and the dashboards are easy to understand."

"The compliance is the most valuable aspect."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pros

"It also provides us with a single tool to manage our entire cloud architecture. In fact, we are using a multi-account strategy with our AWS organization. We use Prisma as a single source of truth to identify high- or medium-severity threats inside our organization."

"The CWP module, runtime protection, and WAAS API are valuable."

"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."

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

"The solution's dashboard looks very user-friendly."

"Prisma Cloud provides the needed visibility and control regardless of how complex and distributed the cloud environments become."

"We found it to be easy and flexible. We could easily configure it for our needs, and we could spread the Prisma Cloud platform to 16 countries without encountering any kind of problem."

"Technical support is quite helpful."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pros

Cons

"I would like the solution to improve its support response time."

"There could be some limitations that from the converged infrastructure perspective: when you want to converge with everything and you want Imperva to get there easily because it's not a cloud component. For example, when you want to build servers and you're using OneView to manage your software-defined networks, implementing Imperva right away is not that simple. But if you're doing just a simple cloud infrastructure with servers in there, you're good to go. Also, we are not able, with Imperva, to block by signatures. Imperva by itself needs to be complemented with another service to do URL filtering."

"The Imperva Web Application Firewall automations are good, but there is still room for improvement with them."

"The tool needs to improve CPU and storage memory."

"The UI interface needs improvement."

"It is complicated to integrate the solution's on-cloud version with other platforms."

"Sometimes, support tickets don't get addressed quickly."

"It's a complicated tool to keep."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall cons

"In terms of securing cloud-native development at build time, a lot of improvement is needed. Currently, it's more a runtime solution than a build-time solution. For runtime, I would rate it at seven out of 10, but for build-time there is a lot of work to be done."

"They need to make the settings more flexible to fit our internal policies about data. We didn't want developers to see some data, but we wanted them to have access to the console because it was going to help them... It was a pain to have to set up the access to some languages and some data."

"One of the requests is that Prisma Defender for the ECS solution is only supported for Linux. It does not support Windows."

"When there are updates, whether daily, weekly, or monthly, it needs configuration or permission adjustments. There is no automation for that, which is too bad."

"The UI is good, however, they could improve the experience."

"The integration of the Compute function into the cloud monitoring function—because those are two different tools that are being combined together—could use some more work. It still feels a little bit disjointed."

"A couple of exporting functionalities should be more user-friendly because if I want to export something, I can get a lot of data visible to that particular CSV."

"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."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Imperva’s pricing is a bit higher in the market since it offers a full-blown WAF."

"Make sure you understand the way that Imperva charges. It's very affordable. However, I would like to see a package with the Virtual Patching included. You get to do patching separately."

"It's an excellent product, but it can be very costly."

"There are some licenses that you have to buy to use some features. Its price could be better. Price is always important because, at the end of the day, customers have a budget. If you can meet the budget, you can sell, and if you don't, you cannot sell."

"There are a couple of different licensing models."

"The solution's pricing is an issue."

"Imperva Web Application Firewall price is higher compared to other solutions. However, everything is included in the price."

"The price is high compared to other solutions like FortiWeb."

More Imperva Web Application Firewall pricing and cost advice

"Prisma Cloud is affordable."

"Prisma Cloud is more expensive than some other solutions, but when we consider all of its use cases, the cost averages out."

"The pricing is good. They gave us some good discounts right at the end of the year based on the value that it brings, visibility, and the ability to build in cloud, compliance, and security within one dashboard."

"The cost was not on the higher side. Overall, the cost gets recovered with its implementation."

"The Prisma Cloud pricing is good."

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

"From my exposure so far, they have been really flexible on whatever your current state is, with a view to what the future state might be. There's no hard sell. They "get" the journey that you're on, and they're trying to help you embrace cloud security, governance, and compliance as you go."

"The pricing structure is easy to understand. Depending on the use case the pricing of the solution can be different. There are not any additional costs to the standard living fees."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

12%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Educational Organization

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

My recommendation is Imperva.

See all answers

Is Citrix ADC (formerly Netscaler) the best ADC to use and if not why?

For ADC, any ADC can do a good job. But in case if you want to add WAF functionality to the same ADC hardware you have to look for other ADC's like F5, Imperva, Radware, Fortinet, etc.

See all answers

DDoS solutions: Any other solutions to consider aside from Radware DDoS Protection Service and F5 Silverline DDoS Protection?

You can have a look to Imperva Cloud WAF, the anti-DDoS mitigation is under 1s and works very well. I observed a lot of DDoS attacks that were well managed (even not seen by the customer) by Imperv...

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

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 15% of the time

F5 Advanced WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudflare vs Imperva Web Application Firewall

Compared 3% of the time

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Wiz vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 22% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 11% 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

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall

June 2025

Download Imperva Web Application Firewall product report

Buyer's Guide

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

May 2025

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report

Download Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

Imperva Web Application Firewall is a versatile solution that protects web applications and databases from various attacks, including DDoS, cross-site scripting, and SQL injection attacks. It offers data security, availability, and access control and can be deployed on-premises or on the cloud.

The solution has good security against web attacks and offers advanced bot protection, API security, and mitigation features. Imperva WAF is easy to configure and deploy; it has good customer service and an excellent user interface.

Imperva

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

BlueCross BlueShield, eHarmony, EMF Broadcasting, GE Healthcare, Metro Bank, The Motley Fool, Siemens

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

Buyer's Guide

Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

June 2025

Free Report: Imperva Web Application Firewall vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

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