Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Varonis Platform comparison

Palo Alto Networks and Varonis are both solutions in the Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) category. Palo Alto Networks is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6, while Varonis is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.0. Palo Alto Networks holds a 14.8% mindshare in DSPM, compared to Varonis’s 8.8% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Palo Alto Networks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Varonis users who would recommend it.

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

Read 111 Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks reviews

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9,391 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Varonis Platform

Read 14 Varonis Platform reviews

8,652 Views
2,855 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto N...

Varonis Platform

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2025

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and Varonis Platform are major competitors in the security solution industry, focusing on cloud and data security, respectively. Prisma Cloud seems to have an upper hand with its comprehensive range of features catering to cloud environments and integration capabilities.

Features: Prisma Cloud offers dynamic workload identity creation, AWS integration, and real-time container scanning, ensuring robust cloud security. Additionally, it facilitates vulnerability scanning and compliance monitoring across heterogeneous environments. Varonis Platform focuses on data access governance, offering comprehensive analysis of user activities and identifying sensitive data to aid threat management.

Room for Improvement: Prisma Cloud needs a better user experience and clearer licensing models, with demands for enhanced policy customization and increased automation. Its interface and documentation require attention, and the cost is a concern. Varonis Platform users desire improved integration with cloud platforms, more flexible licensing, and enhanced usability for large datasets. Transitioning to full cloud support and pricing remains challenging.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Prisma Cloud is versatile, supporting both public and hybrid cloud deployments effectively. While customer service is generally positive, some users report delays in response times. Varonis Platform offers robust support for on-premises and hybrid deployments, with a consistently responsive technical support team.

Pricing and ROI: Prisma Cloud is deemed expensive but valued for its comprehensive feature set. Users find its pricing model confusing, though ROI is often noted in improved security and efficiency. Varonis Platform is also considered costly but delivers significant ROI through enhanced visibility and threat prevention, making it suitable for larger enterprises.

To learn more, read our detailed Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs. Varonis Platform Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs. Varonis Platform

July 2025

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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 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)

Varonis Platform

Ranking in Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (9th), Data Governance (4th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (5th), Compliance Management (7th), Ransomware Protection (11th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) category, the mindshare of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is 14.8%, down from 20.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Varonis Platform is 8.8%, up from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

Featured Reviews

Mohammad Qaw

Senior Security Consultant at helpag

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.

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Herman Pienaar

Senior Security Consultant at Intalock Technologies

Has valuable data alerting capabilities and efficient reporting features

The solution's classification engine is highly configurable and efficient. It provides good reporting and visualization, which is superior to previous tools like Microsoft's. The platform's data alerting capabilities and automation features for managing broken permissions are particularly notable. It offers robust automation capabilities, including global permission repair, broken access repairs, and data transport engine features for archiving and migration. The automation tools are useful for managing permissions and performing cleanup tasks efficiently. It provides strong reporting capabilities that help customers adhere to regulations and maintain compliance. Automating reporting is beneficial for maintaining robust governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) posture. It does incorporate some AI elements, particularly in its data alerting module. However, AI integration has yet to be the primary focus of my implementations. AI is expected to play a larger role in future enhancements. I recommend Varonis, particularly its effectiveness in performing data security remediation tasks. Despite its high cost, it is valuable for its capabilities and the lack of impact on end users. Overall, I rate it a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I would rate Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks ten out of ten."

"The most valuable feature is that the rule set is managed and that it can be run on a regularly scheduled basis."

"What I like most about Prisma Cloud is its zero-day signatures, maximum security, minimal downtime, cloud visibility, control, and ease of deployment."

"I like Palo Alto's threat protection and Wi-Fi coverage. It has advanced features like DNS security and sandboxing. The automation capabilities are excellent."

"The ability to monitor the artifact repository is one of the most valuable features because we have a disparate set of development processes, but everything tends to land in a common set of artifact repositories. The solution gives us a single point where we can apply security control for monitoring. That's really helpful."

"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."

"The Twistlock vulnerability scanning tool is its most valuable feature. It provides us insight into security vulnerabilities, running inside both on-premise and public cloud-based container platforms. It is filling a gap that we have with traditional vulnerability scanning tools, where we don't have the ability to scan inside containers."

"The solution offers very good configuration capabilities."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pros

"There's also a 90-day policy where if a user is not using the warehouse, it will automatically delete that username."

"Varonis Platform is transparent and captures everything in the environment without impacting the performance. The tool helps us unify data feeds into a single reporting system."

"The solution has significantly improved data security and compliance posture by allowing us to track and monitor activities. We can see who accesses data and when files are created and understand what's happening in our environment."

"Technical support from Varonis is rated as nine out of ten."

"The most important feature is remediation. In remediation support, there is no group permission. We'll go ahead and remediate the access from the Dell folder to the parent folder."

"On the Varonis side, technical support is phenomenal. Their ability to explain is very good, and they seem to be very knowledgeable. When I get an alert that doesn't quite make sense, they dive in there and kind of take me through it. That's very useful and very good. There are some false alerts, but it is better to have a false alert than no alert at all."

"That alerting and reporting service is great."

"The solution's classification engine is highly configurable and efficient."

More Varonis Platform pros

Cons

"These tools have a set of signatures or rules that will alert you whenever something meets the criteria. In the future, they might include some machine learning or AI feature that allows you to ask questions about the context of the alert, and it will provide you answers based on the data that they have. Most vendors are doing it, and I believe they will do it in the future. The reporting bar could also use AI to add context based on the environment."

"One of the main backlogs in their development is in the area of integration. For example, we have ServiceNow in place for ticket management and Prisma Cloud is supposed to send closure emails for incidents. But from time to time, it fails to do so. We have several other mismatches between Prisma Cloud and ServiceNow."

"There are hundreds of built-in policies for AWS and Azure, but GCP and Oracle are not covered as much as AWS. There is a lot of work to do on that part. There is, obviously, a tiny bit of favoritism towards AWS because it has the most market share."

"It would be ideal if they could somehow reduce the deployment time."

"The data security model needs improvement due to integration issues with certain features and cloud providers."

"Palo Alto should work on ease-of-use and the user-friendliness to be more competitive with some competing products."

"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."

"Palo Alto needs to add more support staff to improve their response time."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks cons

"The remediation process can be improved. There will be no existing permission group for the McAfee channel domains. We can create a new permissions group for the required folder."

"We have Microsoft Office 365. I just saw an article today which says that they're actually getting integrated with Microsoft Office 365, which would be a useful feature. For user-based reports, log on activity, and stuff like that, it doesn't seem to really be present like Log360. That could just be my inexperience with it. I've been dealing with it for only about two and a half months."

"I'd like to see automatic updates for this solution. Currently, it's a manual process to update all the keywords"

"The GUI should be more functional. There should be a process for connecting through Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc."

"For unstructured data monitoring, it's one of the top ones, if not the top one, due to its usability."

"Varonis requires more access permissions for its core functions compared to competitors, which can be a concern for companies about data safety."

"One area for improvement is the calculation engine. When applying rules in Varonis, especially for large datasets (terabytes of data), the calculations can be slow and require time to process. Speeding up this process would be beneficial."

"Varonis requires more access permissions for its core functions compared to competitors, which can be a concern for companies about data safety."

More Varonis Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is very expensive, but the cost is a necessary evil; I don't know how we could have any kind of cloud presence without this type of monitoring. The pricing is calculated by module and resource usage. Ultimately, it saves us money in the amount of time we would spend uncovering what it uncovers, and we might not make the required discoveries without it anyway. Prisma offers incredible value, though I wish it were cheaper."

"Prisma Cloud is more expensive than Check Point CloudGuard."

"The pricing structure is easy to understand. Depending on the use case the pricing of the solution can be different. There are not any additional costs to the standard living fees."

"In general, Prisma Cloud is much cheaper than cloud-native services."

"The pricing is competitive; for the most part, the security firms have similar prices."

"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."

"We are encountering some resistance in the African market regarding the cost of Prisma Cloud."

"Our licensing fees are $18,000 USD per year."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is good. It neither expensive nor cheap. It is average."

"The platform is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."

"It's expensive, kind of, really expensive."

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."

"Licensing is on an annual basis. Maintenance and renewal fees are separate. Varonis Datalert is quite expensive."

"You could do a subscription, where you pay yearly, or you could purchase it outright. The licensing cost is based on the number of users on the system that you are monitoring."

"Varonis Platform wasn't certainly the cheapest solution."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Varonis Platform?

The solution has significantly improved data security and compliance posture by allowing us to track and monitor activities. We can see who accesses data and when files are created and understand w...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Varonis Platform?

Varonis started as an on-premises solution and is transitioning to cloud. It hasn't fully moved yet, which is an area for improvement. Varonis requires more access permissions for its core function...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Varonis Platform?

The primary use case for Varonis Platform is data discovery, specifically for discovering sensitive data in our organization to protect it. We are looking for a solution that can scan our repositor...

See all answers

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Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Varonis Platform

Compared 20% of the time

Cyera vs Varonis Platform

Compared 11% of the time

BigID vs Varonis Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Wiz vs Varonis Platform

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Purview Information Protection vs Varonis Platform

Compared 3% of the time

More Varonis Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks

August 2025

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report

Download Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks product report

Buyer's Guide

Varonis Platform

July 2025

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Also Known As

Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto

No data available

Overview

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks provides comprehensive cloud-native security solutions. It covers dynamic workload identity, automated forensics, and multi-cloud protection, ensuring robust security across diverse cloud platforms.

Prisma Cloud delivers advanced capabilities for managing cloud security across AWS, Azure, and GCP platforms. It offers dynamic workload identity creation, real-time monitoring, and seamless integration into CI/CD pipelines. With automation, centralized dashboards, and enhanced visibility, users effectively manage security misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. While optimizing cloud environments through runtime protection and compliance, Prisma Cloud faces challenges with its navigation, pricing, and limited automation capabilities. Users seek improvements in API security, role-based access controls, and documentation quality, emphasizing the need for enhanced customization and reporting features.

What are the important features of Prisma Cloud?

Dynamic Workload Identity: Enables unique workload identities for security purposes.
Automated Forensics: Offers detailed insights into threats and incidents automatically.
Runtime Protection: Provides ongoing detection and blocking of suspicious activities.
Multi-Cloud Security: Protects environments on AWS, Azure, and GCP simultaneously.
Compliance Management: Assists in meeting regulatory standards across cloud platforms.

What benefits or ROI should users consider in reviews?

Enhanced Security Posture: Strengthens cloud defense lines with proactive monitoring.
Centralized Dashboard: Offers unified oversight of multiple cloud environments.
Efficient Misconfiguration Handling: Quickly identifies and addresses security lapses.
Seamless CI/CD Integration: Integrates security within development workflows.
Improved Visibility: Provides transparent insights into security operations and alerts.

Industries like finance and telecom rely on Prisma Cloud for managing cloud security posture and container security. Teams utilize its capabilities across hybrid and multi-cloud settings to ensure compliance and robust threat protection. Features like misconfiguration detection and runtime monitoring are critical in promoting security objectives in these sectors.

Palo Alto Networks

Varonis Platform specializes in network security and data monitoring with modules for alerting, data classification, and access management, benefiting environments like Microsoft 365.

Varonis is designed to secure data by auditing and tracking data movement. It leverages data alert and classification modules to identify and manage sensitive information. The platform enhances network security by alerting users to unexpected data modifications and deletions, crucial for effective data loss prevention. It supports unstructured data management, ensuring proper data access and permission controls. Known for its 24/7 support, Varonis offers comprehensive analytics and unified reporting, helping prevent data overexposure and facilitating compliance efforts.

What are the key features of Varonis Platform?

24/7 Support: Provides round-the-clock assistance.
Data Monitoring: Tracks data activities efficiently.
Unified Reporting: Consolidates data access reports.
Data Classification: Identifies sensitive data effectively.
Permission Management: Simplifies managing access rights.
Behavior Analytics: Detects abnormal behavior patterns.

What benefits should be highlighted in user reviews?

Enhanced Security: Improves data protection measures.
Compliance Support: Assists in meeting compliance standards.
Data Transparency: Offers clarity in data access activities.
Access Control: Ensures proper access to data.
Centralized Remediation: Eases remediation procedures.

Varonis Platform is widely utilized in industries needing stringent data confidentiality and management, such as finance and healthcare, for tracking data modifications and unauthorized access. Enterprises deploy it to manage permissions within large datasets, benefiting Microsoft 365 environments. While Varonis requires enhancements in cloud integration, the current deployment is often based on-premises, with attention to addressing the security needs and effective data handling for critical infrastructure.

Varonis

Sample Customers

Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America

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Buyer's Guide

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs. Varonis Platform

July 2025

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