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Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.0
Nutanix Cloud Manager enhances efficiency and reliability, saving costs by optimizing workloads and reducing hardware and operational tasks.
Sentiment score
7.3
Prisma Cloud enhances security and efficiency, reducing risks and response times, offering significant value despite initial costs.
Anything that reduces bandwidth and reduces the brain work that our teams have to do to maintain systems across all environments is time-saving and cost-saving.
The biggest return on investment for me when using this product is the fast deployment and the rapid integration and migration without impacting our operations during the migration.
Playbooks and automation definitely freed up engineer time. This allows us to focus on other projects and not have to get hands-on, reducing operational costs.
It eliminates the need for additional hardware, making it a financially and technically sound investment.
Reputation and data security are the two most important things to a financial institution.
We may have prevented a security breach with remediation of the findings.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.1
Nutanix Cloud Manager's support is praised for quick response, knowledgeable staff, proactive solutions, and exceptional customer service worldwide.
Sentiment score
7.1
Prisma Cloud support is praised for responsiveness, though some report slow responses and varying support quality across regions.
There is a feature that allows you to escalate the call.
The handoff with support and the knowledge of the support engineer is significantly better than experience with other vendors.
Even when a node goes down, it doesn't impact our infrastructure because it gets load-balanced between the available nodes.
They can respond with technical documentation or pass on the case to the next level because it requires the development of a new feature or changing a feature due to a bug.
One is always available.
For issues rated as a high priority, they provide assistance within one to two hours.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Nutanix Cloud Manager offers scalable, flexible, and automated management of diverse IT environments, enhancing performance and integration capabilities.
Sentiment score
7.8
Prisma Cloud scales well across environments, integrates seamlessly, and automates operations, though costs rise with increased licenses.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) scales well.
The key aspects include mix-match hardware and hyper-converged infrastructure, combining compute, storage, and network in a single platform.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has not had any issues scaling with the growing needs of my company.
It's very scalable and very easy to use.
It's scalable.
The scalability is also a 10 out of 10.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Nutanix Cloud Manager is praised for stability with minimal downtime, self-maintenance, and reliability, suitable for critical applications.
Sentiment score
8.0
Prisma Cloud offers reliable performance and stability, effectively handling environments with rare interruptions and quickly resolved issues.
We've never had any downtime related to the Nutanix product itself.
I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.
The stability and reliability of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) have been excellent.
I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.
Prisma Cloud is a stable platform.
The solution is stable and is capable of covering large enterprises.
 

Room For Improvement

Nutanix Cloud Manager needs enhanced cloud platform support, improved efficiency, streamlined management, and better third-party integration and usability.
Prisma Cloud needs improvements in documentation, UI, automation, integrations, pricing, and support, with challenges in compliance and cloud support.
It supports different hardware types without vendor lock-in, which is an advantage over Azure Stack HCI, which may only work with specific vendors such as HP or Dell.
Our primary reason for choosing Nutanix was for mission-critical applications and Kubernetes.
Quick resolution of disconnection issues and errors in plugins is crucial.
From a developer's perspective, especially for organizations like banks developing their applications, ensuring API security before deploying them to the cloud is crucial.
Prisma Cloud is an excellent tool.
Even though documentation was available, it took a while for a new person to understand what integration meant, what will be achieved after the integration, or how the integration needed to be done on the Azure or AWS side.
 

Setup Cost

Nutanix Cloud Manager provides flexible pricing and cost-effectiveness, appealing to diverse budgets, with discounts often in government sectors.
Prisma Cloud is expensive but valued for comprehensive security, flexible licensing, and potential cost savings in multi-cloud environments.
It's not cheap, but there are savings and return on investment when coming from a non-Nutanix shop.
In comparison, Nutanix's pricing is significantly higher than that of other setups.
While VMware costs depend on ESXi hypervisor pricing, the AHV hypervisor for Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is free.
The cost was not on the higher side.
That's why a lot of our clients are shifting from cloud-native to Prisma Cloud: because of its effectiveness and because it is budget-friendly as well.
The solution is very expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers a simple interface, robust automation, centralized management, and enhanced data protection for efficient IT operations.
Prisma Cloud enhances security with dynamic identity creation, compliance management, and integration across AWS and CI/CD pipelines.
It's easy to control resources and govern the resources, and it frees up support to focus on other things without having to help developers.
I would approximate the cost savings to be in the 20% to 25% range since we can optimize our resources and avoid the need to purchase more hardware or reuse resources in the infrastructure from one implementation.
The importance of faster outcomes for their environment is significant; for example, when I delivered the Disaster Recovery solution, we included automation for auto-configuration of VMs and resizing of VMs, which replaced many tasks that were previously done manually.
The automation capabilities are excellent.
With this product, we can monitor all the things even if they are on different clouds - and it can be done on one platform.
What I like most about Prisma Cloud is its zero-day signatures, maximum security, minimal downtime, cloud visibility, control, and ease of deployment.
 

Categories and Ranking

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
7th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (3rd), Cloud Management (1st), Virtualization Management Tools (2nd), Cloud Cost Management (2nd)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...
Ranking in Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
2nd
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)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is 13.5%, down from 20.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks13.5%
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)0.7%
Other85.8%
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
 

Featured Reviews

Kumargaurav Kadam - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers centralized management, cost-effectiveness, and scalability
The licensing is much cheaper than other competitors such as VMware, Cisco UCS, or Microsoft Hyper-V for on-premises data centers. It is very user-friendly and can be managed through Prism Central, a centralized console that allows management of multiple clusters. Due to the recent conversion from VMware to Broadcom, Broadcom has increased their prices five times the existing rates. Most customers are transferring to Nutanix infrastructure because it is scalable, reliable, and performance-focused. The main differentiator from competitors is its cost-effectiveness, and customers have been running and upgrading their technologies for 10 to 15 years. In terms of client satisfaction, performance, upgrades, or protection against ransomware attacks and vulnerabilities, they are regularly releasing patches and upgrading the system. These activities contribute to customer satisfaction and differentiate them from competitors.
Harsh_Vardhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides visibility and control that our customers need
Different modules are valuable for different customers. We are leveraging CSPM. It is one of the best solutions for comprehensive visibility into cloud resource configurations and compliance. It has a lot of out-of-the-box policies, and the visibility that we are getting is impressive. The DSPM module is valuable. This is the latest one that Palo Alto procured from Dig Security. No competitor provides this functionality in a single pane of glass. The support for Linux and container security is also very good. That is the beauty of Prisma Cloud. However, in terms of Windows security, Prisma Cloud is lacking because currently, there is no runtime protection available. The UI is very good. We get all the things within a single UI. It is easy to use. A new user can easily understand it. It is very user-friendly.
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869,202 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
31%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise64
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise58
 

Questions from the Community

Which set of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) features do you find to be the most useful?
For me, the features related to cost savings are the best part of NCM. Of course, the whole product is worth using and when it comes to cloud management, there is a reason why it is favored by so m...
Are the setup process and further maintenance of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) difficult?
When I came into my current organization, NCM was already set up. According to the team that dealt with it, the product was fairly easy to set up. Compared to other products, our IT rates are set u...
Is Nutanix Cloud Manager’s Intelligent Operations feature effective?
Yes, this is a highly effective feature and the rebranding only made things better as they introduced more improvements. You can benefit from Zero coding task automation Automated optimization Tic...
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

Nutanix Cloud Manager Intelligent Operations, Nutanix Cloud Manager Self-Service, Nutanix Cloud Management Cost Governance, Nutanix Cloud Manager Security Central
Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
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 Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,202 professionals have used our research since 2012.