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

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 25, 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
7.6
Nutanix Cloud Manager offers cost savings, improved efficiency, scalability, and automation, leading to enhanced performance and customer satisfaction.
Sentiment score
7.3
Prisma Cloud improves security, reduces risk, and enhances efficiency with automation, despite cost challenges and complex ROI calculations.
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.
From a security standpoint, we have significantly enhanced our client's security posture by implementing Prisma Cloud.
The platform is not famous for being cheap. It is quite expensive, but we know that we have the protection, so there is enough value for what we pay for.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
8.3
Users praise Nutanix Cloud Manager's expert, proactive support team for quick issue resolution, despite some regional response time differences.
Sentiment score
7.1
Prisma Cloud generally receives high praise for its responsive technical support, despite occasional delays and region-specific variability.
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.
The customer service and technical support I've received have been phenomenal.
Whenever I have issues with the solution, I will get an immediate response from the product team and they will try to close the issue as soon as possible.
When you send them a message, you get a response in a minute or two.
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.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Nutanix Cloud Manager excels in scalability, offering easy node addition, efficient management, and robust deployment for growing infrastructures.
Sentiment score
7.8
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks offers scalable, flexible performance across multi-cloud environments, supporting seamless expansion and integration.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) scales well.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has not had any issues scaling with the growing needs of my company.
Scaling with Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is not as straightforward as they claim, largely due to the assumption that you have IPv6 enabled on your switches.
It's very scalable and very easy to use.
I would rate the scalability of Prisma Cloud as an eight out of ten.
I am highly impressed with the product's scalability.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Nutanix Cloud Manager is highly reliable and stable, with users appreciating its seamless operation despite minor update challenges.
Sentiment score
8.0
Prisma Cloud is generally stable with minimal issues, rare downtimes, and is highly rated by users for reliability.
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 cannot recall any downtime with the solution.
I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.
The tool responds well in small-scale infrastructures, functioning perfectly without any issues.
 

Room For Improvement

Nutanix Cloud Manager needs interface, integration, pricing, documentation, and feature enhancements, as well as expanded training opportunities.
Prisma Cloud needs better documentation, usability, automation, security features, customizable reports, and faster support for improved efficiency.
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.
Quick resolution of disconnection issues and errors in plugins is crucial.
If there are licensing errors, for example, being told I have 96 cores licensed but Nutanix Flow not licensed despite having assigned units, it complicates things unnecessarily.
It is a SaaS solution, but some of my clients have a local regulatory requirement, and they want to install it locally on their premises.
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.
 

Setup Cost

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers cost-effective pricing, flexible licensing, and efficient management, providing a strong ROI and enterprise appeal.
Prisma Cloud's higher pricing is justified by its comprehensive features, but licensing complexity concerns some enterprise buyers.
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.
It is not cheap or expensive.
Prisma Cloud is remarkably expensive.
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.
 

Valuable Features

Nutanix Cloud Manager offers one-click upgrades, centralized management, dynamic automation, and APIs for efficient, scalable, and intuitive IT operations.
Prisma Cloud offers multi-cloud security with compliance, automation, CI/CD integration, and quick threat response via a centralized platform.
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.
We could spread the Prisma Cloud platform to 16 countries without encountering any kind of problem.
Prisma Cloud provides risk clarity at runtime and across the entire pipeline, like, showing issues as they're discovered during the build phases.
Identifying misconfigurations and vulnerabilities at the first stage itself will help the organization save time and money - which is highly appreciated.
 

Categories and Ranking

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)
Ranking in Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
7th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
101
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (4th), Cloud Management (2nd), Virtualization Management Tools (4th), 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
110
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (5th), Container Security (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) category, the mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is 15.9%, down from 21.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
 

Featured Reviews

Vipin Kumar Sha - PeerSpot reviewer
Stands out with auto-scaling, auto-scheduled snapshots, and single-vendor support
The areas that could be improved include the Nutanix Move tool, which is presently used for migrating VMs from one setup to a private cloud. It can be improved by adding some other setups, such as Citrix Xen, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenShift. There are many other cloud products that need to be added to the Nutanix Move tool, which would be really helpful for us in India, where we use different setups such as Red Hat Virtualization, OpenShift, Citrix XenCenter, Hyper-V, and VMware. The second suggestion is regarding the different clusters in Nutanix. Although Nutanix is very user-friendly and codeless, the individual clusters cannot be logged in at the same time via Prism, which takes time and can be wasteful. We have multiple clusters within Nutanix. Prism serves as the central management interface, allowing us to access these different clusters. When we log in through Prism, it takes a certain amount of time—sometimes several minutes—to log into each individual cluster. This can be quite time-consuming. Another important issue, especially for our customers in India and other data centers, is the need for proper VM tool reports. We require detailed information such as VM names, IP addresses, CPU assignments, and CPU utilization. This data should be exported in an Excel format. For example, if a virtual machine has four CPUs, the Excel report should include entries like: VM name, IP address, 4 CPUs, and current utilization (e.g., if 2 out of 4 CPUs are being used). We also need to capture other parameters, such as memory and disk configurations (e.g., hard disk 1 and hard disk 2), whether any ISOs are mounted (like CD/DVDs), USB drives attached to the VM, storage types (like NVM), and any RDMs associated with the VM. By extracting all this information into an Excel file, we would create a handy inventory for all the engineers. This detailed VM list would be extremely beneficial for cloud engineers and managers working with Nutanix.
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.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) solutions are best for your needs.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
34%
Educational Organization
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Educational Organization
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.