Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
7.1
Nutanix Cloud Manager boosts efficiency, reduces costs, and enhances reliability through streamlined management, automation, and resource optimization.
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
8.2
Nutanix Cloud Manager's customer service is praised for efficiency, responsiveness, proactive support, and knowledgeable staff, despite occasional time zone issues.
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.
We have easier access to high-level engineers compared to VMware, where you have to navigate multiple channels for support.
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
7.6
Nutanix Cloud Manager offers scalable, efficient management with seamless expansion capabilities, praised for flexibility and ease in hybrid settings.
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.
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 am highly impressed with the product's scalability.
It's scalable.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Nutanix Cloud Manager is highly stable, with minimal downtime, efficient maintenance, and strong support for mission-critical tasks.
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 cannot recall any downtime with the solution.
I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.
Prisma Cloud is stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Nutanix Cloud Manager could improve VM organization, user experience, feature availability, and integrations while refining automation and support.
Prisma Cloud needs improvements in documentation, UI, automation, integrations, pricing, and support, with challenges in compliance and cloud support.
Our primary reason for choosing Nutanix was for mission-critical applications and Kubernetes.
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

Enterprise buyers view Nutanix Cloud Manager as initially costly but recognize long-term savings and competitive pricing compared to alternatives.
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.
It is not cheap or 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.
The solution is very expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Nutanix Cloud Manager simplifies infrastructure management with user-friendly features, automation, and cost governance for cloud and on-premise 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.
Identifying misconfigurations and vulnerabilities at the first stage itself will help the organization save time and money - which is highly appreciated.
I have one example of a threat that Prisma proactively prevented. In 2021, Prisma discovered and resolved a Log4J vulnerability shortly after it was introduced.
CSPM can audit the current cloud configuration, identify misconfigurations, and assess risk.
 

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
105
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (4th), 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) (6th), Container Security (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 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 14.8%, down from 20.8% 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.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
33%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Government
4%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
 

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: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.