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Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 25, 2025

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

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)
The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (po...
Ranking in Web Application Firewall (WAF)
27th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) category, the mindshare of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is 2.1%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) is 1.0%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Application Firewall (WAF)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Archana Heeralal - PeerSpot reviewer
A good solution to implement web application firewall for applications
There are some lags in Signal Sciences for the web application firewalls. Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic. There is a little bit of complexity with custom rules that should be removed. Signal Sciences should add a feature called rate limiting with multiple options, wherein I can create a rate limiting based on the cookie request or the IP.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Prisma was extremely comprehensive. It's easy to drill down to gather more information and keep going. It seemed like you could drill down forever to see what the vulnerability was linked to."
"The first aspect that is important is the fact that Prisma Cloud is cloud-agnostic. It's actually available for the five top cloud providers: AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, and Alibaba Cloud. The second aspect is the fact that we can write our own rules to try to detect misconfigurations in those environments."
"What I found most valuable in Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is the VAS, such as the web application and API security. I feel that VAS adds a lot of value, mainly because it gives visibility through the application layer and threat detection features."
"The most valuable feature of Prisma Cloud for our clients is CSPM, as it helps clients gain visibility into all the assets with their cloud providers."
"Prisma Cloud's most important feature is its auto-remediation."
"With the query language, we can analyze logs and find out which IPs are malicious. It also provides a graphical representation. It provides the overall visibility and how the traffic is flowing. We can see where the malicious IP is and whether it is an insider threat or an outsider threat."
"Prisma Cloud helped us with compliance. Most of my deployments have been greenfield, so I don't have a benchmark to compare how the security posture has improved. I've always used this from day zero of the configuration. However, I can say that the compliance checks for PCI, DSS, HIPAA, etc., made my life simpler. I don't need to look at each of these standards and compare the rules I have in place."
"This solution helped us by allowing us to schedule and fix things. This is not an easy thing if you're managing 1,000 plus resources."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily."
"When configuring a web application firewall using Signal Sciences, we configure a rule whereby no one except a few people can access the application."
"Fastly (Signal Sciences) integrates and tags the intermittent traffic based on patterns. It generates signals and provides them in a dashboard where we can view them and decide whether to allow or deny traffic. It's a more advanced and easy-to-navigate dashboard."
 

Cons

"The solution does not currently support servers for GCP."
"It would be nice Prisma Cloud merged its modules for CSPM and infrastructure as code. It would simplify the pricing and make it easier for customers to evaluate the solution because there are different modules, and you need to add it to your subscription separately."
"There should be some kind of automation, AI incorporation, and bot system. All these would add value."
"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."
"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."
"Runecast gave us more visibility into VMware's private cloud. We have more environments there, but Prisma's lack of visibility into the private cloud was a downside—there weren't many."
"We would like it to have more features from the risk and compliance perspectives."
"The information presented in the UI sometimes doesn't look intuitive enough."
"Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai."
"Even if we create some custom rules, Signal Sciences cannot capture some of the malicious traffic."
"The areas that could be improved in Signal Sciences include the effectiveness of rules, as many didn't function optimally and required custom rule-writing to address bypasses for WAF."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you pay for three years of Palo Alto, it's better. If you're planning on doing this, it's obviously not going to be for one year, so it's better if you go with a three-year license... The only challenge we have is with the public cloud vendor pricing. The biggest lesson I have learned is around the issues related to pricing for public cloud. So when you are doing your segmentation and design, it is extremely important that you work with someone who knows and understands what kinds of needs you will have in the future and how what you are doing will affect you in terms of costs."
"The pricing and licensing are expensive compared to the other offerings that we considered."
"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."
"Although the cost can be high, the value is worth the price tag."
"The price is high. In the future, when there are more competitors at the same level with different clouds, maybe the position will be different."
"Prisma Cloud is a value-back cloud-managed solution; cloud-native solutions are quite expensive."
"I find the pricing to be expensive."
"The pricing and the licensing are both very fair... The biggest advice I would give in terms of costs would be to try to understand what the growth is going to look like. That's really been our biggest struggle, that we don't have an idea of what our future growth is going to be on the platform. We go from X number of licenses to Y number of licenses without a plan on how we're going to get from A to B, and a lot of that comes as a bit of a surprise. It can make budgeting a real challenge for it."
"The product has an affordable cost."
"Signal Sciences is pretty cheap compared to other solutions."
"The pricing is 50% less than Akamai."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Educational Organization
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Educational Organization
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
What do you like most about Signal Sciences?
The product's most valuable feature is its ability to set up the rules easily.
What needs improvement with Signal Sciences?
Fastly don't support caching for China users. That's the only feature lacking compared to Akamai.
 

Also Known As

Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
Signal Sciences Next-Gen WAF, Signal Sciences RASP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
Chef, Adobe, Datadog, Etsy, GrubHub, Vimeo, SendGrid, Under Armour, Duo, AppNexus
Find out what your peers are saying about Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs. The Fastly Next-Gen WAF (powered by Signal Sciences) and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.