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Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Tenable.io Container Security comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 1, 2026

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

Qualys TotalCloud
Sponsored
Ranking in Container Security
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (10th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (9th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (7th)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...
Ranking in Container Security
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
Web Application Firewall (WAF) (7th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (2nd), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (2nd)
Tenable.io Container Security
Ranking in Container Security
25th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Container Security category, the mindshare of Qualys TotalCloud is 1.8%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is 7.3%, down from 10.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tenable.io Container Security is 1.0%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Container Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks7.3%
Qualys TotalCloud1.8%
Tenable.io Container Security1.0%
Other89.9%
Container Security
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2859021 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Security Engineer at a tech vendor with 5,001-10,000 employees
Risk-based triage has transformed container security and now prioritizes high-impact threats
The best features Qualys TotalCloud offers currently include managing cloud infrastructure and container security while facing major challenges such as alert fatigue. Traditional vulnerability scanners flag hundreds of CVEs on short-lived Kubernetes containers, some of which have no internet exposure or are gone before we can even triage them. I leverage Qualys TotalCloud to move beyond static CVSS. I use it to implement runtime exposure, correlation risk reprioritization, and shift-left integration. This notifies developers to fix a base image upstream rather than patching live ephemeral instances. In my work with cloud and container security, the biggest operational hurdle was alert fatigue. I use Qualys to shift left from static CVSS severity to context-aware risk prioritization. I correlated raw vulnerability data with real-time risk factors such as public network exposure, active runtime execution, or overly permissive IAM roles. This allows us to immediately drop the priority of isolated containers and escalate lower-severity CVEs that sit on an exposed, high-risk path. We can map these findings directly back to our CI/CD pipelines so developers can patch the root base images upstream. We have drastically cut down the signal-to-noise ratio, saved a lot of manual hours doing triage work, and ensured engineering effort goes directly towards high-impact risk reduction.
reviewer2776578 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Image scanning has supported consistent security practices during cloud deployment
On a scale of ten, we would say people are happy with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks for the part we use. People are okay with it. We probably would give an eight. We don't give ten because if we don't use the other parts of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, it's because it was difficult to implement from an operational point of view. We could have deployed the runtime monitoring with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, but within our organization at our company, it was very difficult to find who would be the owner for the alerts. People have other tools and in the end, we don't use the full capabilities of a product that we pay for. It's partially related to the difficulty to integrate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks runtime in our company's support process. We don't use the real-time monitoring part of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks. We don't know about the automated remediation feature of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks.
AS
Cyber Security Architect at a security firm with 201-500 employees
Detailed container image reports have improved vulnerability insight and support secure operations
Most valuable are the reports that are quite good, particularly the detailed ones for container image scanning. Tenable.io Container Security is giving me the vulnerability information of Docker images and the information about software bill of materials. However, my challenge at this time is that I am using all these solutions with GitLab Ultimate, and it does not support integration, so I am doing some alternate arrangements which are giving me operational complexity because I need to introduce something else instead of GitLab Ultimate. That is the primary concern regarding the benefits of real-time visibility into my containerized application security status.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"While automatic inventory detection upon connection is a helpful feature, a truly valuable capability would be assessing an environment's security posture against Azure and CIS best practices."
"Vulnerability and threat detection and assessment of the criticality of the vulnerabilities exposed are most valuable."
"I depend heavily on the reports that I have from this tool."
"By integrating TotalCloud, we have significantly reduced vulnerabilities in our deployment pipeline."
"Qualys TotalCloud's most valuable features are its security capabilities that help identify and mitigate risk factors."
"Qualys TotalCloud provides unified vulnerability and threat assessment for IaaS and SaaS and a single prioritized view of risk, which helps reduce my workload by not having to combine multiple sources."
"The vulnerability management feature is the one I like the most because it provides a clear picture of all vulnerabilities."
"I appreciate TotalCloud's real-time protection and remediation features. The remediation options include automated one-click remedies and custom changes that help manage vulnerabilities efficiently."
"Prisma Cloud provides the visibility and control that we need, regardless of how complex or distributed our cloud environments become, which is very nice."
"I was looking for a vulnerability scanner and I was looking for one place in which I could find everything. This tool not only does vulnerability scanning, but it also gives me an asset management tool."
"The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud is WAF (web application firewall)."
"I've been really pleasantly surprised with how Prisma Cloud is, over time, covering more and more of the topics I care about, and listening to customer feedback and growing the product in the right directions."
"Cloud security posture management is the preferred feature among other vendors."
"The most valuable feature is the closed VPN connection, which provides better performance than traditional VPN boxes. For example, let's say a user in New York State normally connects in the East, but if they travel to the UK, they can connect to the same portal, which automatically redirects to any VPN gateway. We can control traffic based on Active Directory groups instead of the user's IP. That means a user in New York can access his application based on his user ID and AD group access when he travels to the UK or anywhere else."
"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."
"Palo Alto enables us to know what security threats are happening in the background."
"Currently, I haven't implemented the solution due to its deprecation by the site. However, I can highlight some benefits of Tenable Cloud Security, a cybersecurity solution with various features for scanning vulnerabilities in both cloud environments and on-premises container security."
"The tool's most valuable feature is scanning, reporting, and troubleshooting."
"Nessus scanner is very effective for internal penetration testing."
"By using Nessus, we are able to finish testing with assured results, in half the time."
"It helps us secure our applications from the build phase and identify the weaknesses from scratch."
"Tenable.io detects misconfiguration when you deploy a Docker or Kubernetes container. It's much better to remedy these issues during deployment instead of waiting until the container is already in the production environment."
"The solution shows you the exploitable vulnerabilities and helps you prioritize."
"The strong security provided by the product in the container environment is its most valuable feature."
 

Cons

"The support process is inefficient due to the excessive number of replies required when submitting tickets."
"The main area needing improvement is integration. Although the team is strengthening TotalCloud, integration can be enhanced with SIEM, SOAR, ITSM, and other sources."
"In TotalCloud, I would suggest improvements in policy checks to cater to various inventory types like VPCs, subnets, S3 buckets, or IAMs. There is a lack of data segregation according to criticality or inventory."
"Regarding improvements to Qualys TotalCloud, I suggest that user navigation can be enhanced because initially, many users found it complicated and had trouble understanding the platform due to information being spread across multiple tabs."
"To improve the user experience, reporting could be simplified for better comprehension by end users and project managers, facilitating issue resolution."
"The downside is only in container security, but it has not been a long time since they introduced these models."
"Two areas for improvement in Qualys TotalCloud are the speed of the public cloud platform and vulnerability detection."
"Qualys' customer service provides quality answers, but the response time is long, even though it is within the SLA."
"There I saw one feature called dummy payloads, in which we trigger the dummy payload, so it exactly gives the exploitable resources. That might be a feature that would be helpful if Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks also had some kind of that feature."
"Prisma Cloud is very comprehensive, but there should be better support for the customization of the reports. If Palo Alto can have more customized reports available or give an option to the users to customize the reports, that would be great."
"Palo Alto should work on ease-of-use and the user-friendliness to be more competitive with some competing products."
"We would like to have the detections be more contemporaneous. For example, we've seen detections of an overprivileged user or whatever it might be in any of the hundreds of Prisma policies, where there are 50 minutes of latency between the event and the alert."
"Based on my experience, the customization—especially the interface and some of the product identification components—is not as customizable as it could be. But it makes up for that with the fact that we can access the API and then build our own systems to read the data and then process and parse it and hand it to our teams."
"The Fargate security microservice that's running doesn't support blocking features, which would be helpful. Another issue is the lifecycle. It isn't easy to upgrade if we have a console in Fargate."
"The UX part of Prisma's user interface could be simplified and the metrics tool should be highlighted more."
"There should be some kind of automation, AI incorporation, and bot system. All these would add value."
"The initial setup is highly complex."
"However, my challenge at this time is that I am using all these solutions with GitLab Ultimate, and it does not support integration, so I am doing some alternate arrangements which are giving me operational complexity because I need to introduce something else instead of GitLab Ultimate."
"I believe integration plays a crucial role for Tenable, particularly in terms of connecting with other products and various container solutions like Docker or Kubernetes. It seems that in future updates, enhanced integration is something I would appreciate. Currently, there is integration with Docker, but when it comes to Kubernetes or other container solutions, it appears to be a challenge, especially with on-prem scanners."
"The support is tricky to reach, so we would like better-oriented technical support enabled."
"I feel that in certain areas this product has false positives which the company should work on."
"I feel that in certain areas this product has false positives which the company should work on. They should also try to include business logic vulnerabilities in the scanner testing. Finally, the vulnerability assessment feature should be increased to other hardware devices, apart from firewalls."
"They need to work on auto-remediation so it's easier for the security team to act quickly when certain assets or resources are deployed. The latest version has a CIS benchmark that you need to meet for containers in the cloud, but more automation is needed."
"The stability and setup phase of the product are areas with shortcomings where improvements are needed."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Although Qualys TotalCloud is relatively expensive due to its unique automation features, its cost-effectiveness is rated an eight out of ten, with ten being the most costly."
"The cost is high, but it meets our organizational needs."
"The pricing for TotalCloud is attractive and competitive in the market. Given the features, especially the dashboard, I have no concerns regarding pricing."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers cost-effective licensing flexibility."
"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive."
"I am not sure about the pricing. From what I understand, it is a bit on the higher side, but I do not have the exact numbers."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers competitive pricing given its comprehensive suite of features, including integration, assessment, remediation, and detection capabilities, all within a single platform."
"TotalCloud's price is about right where I would expect it to be."
"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."
"Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks carries a higher cost, but its enhanced security measures justify the expense."
"One thing we're very pleased about is how the licensing model for Prisma is based on work resources. You buy a certain amount of work resources and then, as they enable new capabilities within Prisma, it just takes those work resource units and applies them to new features. This enables us to test and use the new features without having to go back and ask for and procure a whole new product, which could require going through weeks, and maybe months, of a procurement process."
"The pricing for Prisma Cloud is high. Providing a pay-as-you-go model or pricing options tailored for medium and small enterprises could help attract more clients."
"Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is a highly expensive solution."
"Its licensing cost depends on the type of license such as the business license or the enterprise license. The enterprise license is costlier than the business license, but we get more visibility and more modules. If you have a multi-cloud environment and subscribe to each cloud's native CSPM tool, it is costly. If you are using a single tool like Prisma Cloud, with a single license, you can monitor all environments, such as Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, and Oracle Cloud. The cost of Prisma Cloud is less than the cost of subscribing to the CSPM tool of each cloud provider. This is where Prisma Cloud can save costs."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"It is an expensive tool. It is not cheap technology. It is a serious investment for any customer. Customers typically buy it together with services. In my experience, customers buying Prisma Cloud are prepared to pay for the implementation and the tool itself."
"I rate the product’s pricing a six out of ten."
"The product does not operate on a pay-per-license model."
"It's best to be an institutional buyer and directly contact the sales team as they can provide over-the-top discounts for bulk orders."
"The solution's pricing is neither cheap nor very expensive."
"I rate the tool's pricing a three out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
18%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise38
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise21
Large Enterprise58
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qualys TotalCloud?
I was not involved in pricing, setup cost, and licensing, but I can say that the setup was fast, within a quarter, an...
What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
In terms of improvements, the features we are using in Qualys TotalCloud are working in the best optimal way, and I d...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
I have been using Qualys TotalCloud for the last eight months to scan the hardware and the virtual devices in our inf...
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...
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 valu...
What needs improvement with Tenable.io Container Security?
Several things need improvement about Tenable.io Container Security. First, they should support GitLab Ultimate. Seco...
What is your primary use case for Tenable.io Container Security?
I have been dealing with Tenable.io Container Security for almost four to six months.
What advice do you have for others considering Tenable.io Container Security?
Tenable.io Container Security is a good product. I am currently using Tenable Enclave Security. When I say metrics, I...
 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
Tenable FlawCheck, FlawCheck
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
ServiceMaster
Find out what your peers are saying about Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs. Tenable.io Container Security and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
919,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.