Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 5, 2023

We performed a comparison between Aqua Security Platform and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Features: Aqua Security Platform is highly regarded for its ability to secure images, detect malware, and provide on-demand patching. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is commended for its extensive visibility into multi-cloud environments and seamless integration capabilities. Aqua Security Platform could have better reporting and log forwarding. Some users reported high resource consumption and problems with integration. Prisma Cloud could be more customizable and add features like workflow automation and integrated ticketing.
  • Service and Support: Aqua Security Platform users mostly say that support is responsive and helpful. A few users said they had had to resolve issues on their own. Some Prisma Cloud users said the support was excellent, but others were disappointed by slow response times and a lack of progress on their tickets.
  • Ease of Deployment: Some customers said that the Aqua Security Platform was difficult to set up and required specialized knowledge. Prisma Cloud was generally considered straightforward, with help from Palo Alto's engineers and documentation.
  • Pricing: Aqua Security Platform is moderately priced compared to premium solutions like Splunk, but it's still perceived as expensive due to workload-based licensing costs. In contrast, Prisma Cloud is considered fair. Pricing is determined by the licensing model, modules used, and enterprise size. Additional costs associated with public cloud vendor pricing were also mentioned.

Comparison Results: Aqua Security Platform outperforms Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks. Users appreciate Aqua Security's malware detection and container security. The platform is praised for being user-friendly, stable, and capable of on-demand patching. Users found Aqua Security's sandboxing service helpful for identifying security risks. Although Prisma Cloud offers comprehensive visibility and management capabilities, Aqua Security's emphasis on container scanning, drift prevention, and strong runtime security make it our users preferred tool for securing applications and infrastructure.

To learn more, read our detailed Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Report (Updated: May 2024).
786,957 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: What do you think of Aqua Security vs Prisma Cloud?
Answer: 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 very straightforward and went smoothly. This solution is stable with great scalability. We found that Prisma Cloud integrated well with many different solutions. This solution does both development-side security and run-time security very well, which makes it extremely marketable. It offers traffic analysis, user activity, and vulnerability management. Prisma Cloud comes bundled with many different policies, which is very helpful. The dashboard is very informative and offers compliance tabs and other valuable management tabs. Aqua Security does not have good options with other servers - more options would be better outside of the Kubernetes and Docker ecosystems. There should be better integration to the cloud. Deployment needs to be improved, too. Many of our clients continue to have their workforce continuing to work remotely, and deployment can be very problematic. The technical support is a bit spotty and should be more proactive in handling issues and concerns. Prisma Cloud sometimes falls behind on keeping up with changes and updates with other solutions, causing some lag time within the solution. It may also be difficult for individuals who are not so tech-savvy. It is lacking a bit in compliance and risk perspectives and analysis. Conclusions If you have a focus on Kubernetes and/or Docker, Aqua Security could be a great fit. This solution does solve a lot of other problems too. Prisma Cloud can seem inflexible and complicated to use, but if you have a solid plan from the beginning on how to deploy the solution throughout your organization and have done your homework, it can prove to be a very good solution as well.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We liked the search bar in PingSafe. It is a global search. We were able to get some insights from there.""I did a lot of research before signing up and doing the demo. They have a good reputation as far as catching threats early on.""PingSafe offers security solutions for both Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines.""It used to guide me about an alert. There is something called an alert guide. I used to click on the alert guide, and I could read everything. I could read about the alert and how to resolve it. I used to love that feature.""As a frequently audited company, we value PingSafe's compliance monitoring features. They give us a report with a compliance score for how well we meet certain regulatory standards, like HIPAA. We can show our compliance as a percentage. It's also a way to show that we are serious about security.""It is fairly simple. Anybody can use it.""PingSafe offers three key features: vulnerability management notifications, cloud configuration assistance, and security scanning.""PingSafe stands out for its user-friendly interface and intuitive software, making it easy to navigate and use."

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"The CSPM product is great at securing our cloud accounts and I really like the runtime protection for containers and functions too.""The container security element of this product has been very valuable to our organization.""Valuable features include the ability to connect it to our Docker Hub where our images are stored, good integration with Slack, and the connection to the CV, to easily see which CVs are on each image.""We use Aqua Security for the container security features.""Aqua Security allowed us to gain visibility into the vulnerabilities that were present in the container images, that were being rolled out, the amount of risk that we were introducing to the platform, and provided us a look into the container environment by introducing access control mechanisms. In addition, when it came to runtime-level policies, we could restrict container access to resources in our environment, such as network-level or other application-level access.""Their sandboxing service is also really good.""The most valuable feature is the security.""Support is very helpful."

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"What I like most about Prisma Cloud is its zero-day signatures, maximum security, minimal downtime, cloud visibility, control, and ease of deployment.""It has improved the overall collaboration between SecOps and DevOps. Now, instead of asking people to do something, it is a default offering in the CI/CD. There is less manual intervention and more seamless integration. It is why we don't have many dependencies across many teams, which is definitely a better state.""The solution will streamline and minimize manual efforts.""The solution gives us a lot of visibility across all of our cloud solutions.""Its ease of integration is valuable because we need to get the solution out of the door quickly, so speed and ease matter.""CSPM is the most valuable feature for any organization that runs its workloads in the cloud.""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 most valuable feature is its cloud security posture management."

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Cons
"Singularity Cloud Security currently lacks a break-glass account function, which is a critical component for implementing Single Sign-On as it allows for regaining access in emergencies.""The integration with Oracle has room for improvement.""There's an array of upcoming versions with numerous features to be incorporated into the roadmap. Customers particularly appreciate the service's emphasis on intensive security, especially the secret scanning aspect. During the proof of concept (POC) phase, the system is required to gather logs from the customer's environment. This process entails obtaining specific permissions, especially in terms of gateway access. While most permissions for POC are manageable, the need for various permissions may need improvement, especially in the context of security.""I'd like to see better onboarding documentation.""Cloud Native Security's reporting could be better. We are unable to see which images are impacted. Several thousand images have been deployed, so if we can see some application-specific information in the dashboard, we can directly send that report to the team that owns the application. We'd also like the option to download the report from the portal instead of waiting for the report to be sent to our email.""Sometimes the Storyline ID is a bit wacky.""We wanted it to provide us with something like Claroty Hub in AWS for lateral movement. For example, if an EC2 instance or a virtual machine is compromised in a public subnet based on a particular vulnerability, such as Log4j, we want it to not be able to reach some of our databases. This kind of feature is not supported in PingSafe.""I would like additional integrations."

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"Sometimes I got stressed with the UI.""Aqua Security could provide more open documentation so that their learning resources can be more easily accessed and searched through online. Right now, a lot of the documentation is closed and not available to the public.""Aqua Security lacks a lot in reporting.""The solution could improve user-friendliness.""Aqua Security could improve the forwarding of logging into Splunk and into other tools, it should be easier.""There's room for improvement, particularly in management capabilities as it may not be comprehensive enough for all customers, and it has been lacking in the realm of cloud security posture management.""I would like Aqua Security to look into is the development of a web security portal.""It's a bit hard to use the user roles. That was a bit confusing."

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"The integration of the Compute function into the cloud monitoring function—because those are two different tools that are being combined together—could use some more work. It still feels a little bit disjointed.""One definite area for improvement is the auto-remediation or the CWP area. The second one is the RQL language. It is still not very flexible and does not cover a lot of use cases. The RQL language could be dramatically improved to add more options.""When it comes to protecting the full cloud-native stack, it has the right breadth. They're covering all the topics I would care about, like container, cloud configuration, and serverless. There's one gap. There could be a better set of features around identity management—native AWS—IAM roles, and service account management. The depth in each of those areas varies a little bit. While they may have the breadth, I think there's still work to do in flushing out each of those feature sets.""The automation must continue to become much smoother.""A better correlation between the multiple products Prisma Cloud contains would be crucial. It would reduce the time spent looking at reports and enable you to get all the actionable insights across products. I think that Palo Alto is working on it, but they need to work faster because it doesn't make sense to have all these products in a single pane of glass without any correlation between them.""More documentation with real-world use cases would be helpful.""It can be too expensive for small companies.""The UI could be improved."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "As a partner, we receive a discount on the licenses."
  • "It's a fair price for what you get. We are happy with the price as it stands."
  • "I wasn't sure what to expect from the pricing, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a little less than I thought."
  • "Singularity Cloud Workload Security's pricing is good."
  • "Singularity Cloud Workload Security's licensing and price were cheaper than the other solutions we looked at."
  • "I understand that SentinelOne is a market leader, but the bill we received was astronomical."
  • "It's not expensive. The product is in its initial growth stages and appears more competitive compared to others. It comes in different variants, and I believe the enterprise version costs around $55 per user per year. I would rate it a five, somewhere fairly moderate."
  • "The pricing is fair. It is not inexpensive, and it is also not expensive. When managing a large organization, it is going to be costly, but it meets the business needs. In terms of what is out there on the market, it is fair and comparable to what I have seen, so I do not have any complaints about the cost"
  • More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "They were reasonable with their pricing. They were pretty down-to-earth about the way they pitched their product and the way they tried to close the deal. They were one of the rare companies that approached the whole valuation in a way that made sense for our company, for our needs, and for their own requirements as well... They will accommodate your needs if they are able to understand them and they're stated clearly."
  • "Aqua Security is not cheap, and it's not very expensive, such as Splunk, they are in the middle."
  • "Dealing with licensing costs isn't my responsibility, but I know that the licenses don't depend on the number of users, but instead are priced according to your workload."
  • "The pricing of this solution could be improved."
  • "It comes at a reasonable cost."
  • More Aqua Cloud Security Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The purchasing process was easy and quick. It is a very economical solution."
  • "Our licensing fees are $18,000 USD per year."
  • "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 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."
  • "From my exposure so far, they have been really flexible on whatever your current state is, with a view to what the future state might be. There's no hard sell. They "get" the journey that you're on, and they're trying to help you embrace cloud security, governance, and compliance as you go."
  • "If a competitor came along and said, "We'll give you half the price," that doesn't necessarily mean that's the right answer, at all. We wouldn't necessarily entertain it that way. Does it do what we need it to do? Does it work with the things that we want it to work with? That is the important part for us. Pricing wasn't the big consideration it might be in some organizations. We spend millions on public cloud. In that context, it would not make sense to worry about the small price differences that you get between the products."
  • "The pricing and licensing are expensive compared to the other offerings that we considered."
  • "I don't know a better way to do it, but their licensing is a little confusing. That's due to the breadth of different types of technologies they are trying to cover. The way you license depends on where you're securing. When they were Twistlock it was a simple licensing scheme and you could tell what you were doing. Now that they've changed that scheme with Palo Alto, it is quite confusing. It's very difficult to predict what your costs are going to be as you try to expand coverage."
  • More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best… more »
    Top Answer:When I joined my organization, I saw that PingSafe was already implemented. I started to use the tool's alerting… more »
    Top Answer:Aqua Security is easy to use and very manageable. Its main focus is on Kubernetes and Docker. Security is a very… more »
    Top Answer:Customers find it invaluable to have the ability to check for vulnerabilities in an image before deployment, similar to… more »
    Top Answer:It comes at a reasonable cost. When compared to Prisma Cloud, it is more budget-friendly.
    Top Answer:Prisma Cloud helps support DevSecOps methodologies, making those responsibilities easier to manage.
    Top Answer:We like Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, since it offers us incredible visibility into our entire cloud system. We… more »
    Top Answer:Azure Security Center is very easy to use, integrates well, and gives very good visibility on what is happening across… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    PingSafe
    Aqua Security Platform, CloudSploit, Argon
    Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud, Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
    Learn More
    Overview

    Singularity Cloud Security is SentinelOne’s comprehensive, cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). It combines the best of agentless insights with AI-powered threat protection, to secure and protect your multi-cloud infrastructure, services, and containers from build time to runtime. SentinelOne’s CNAPP applies an attacker’s mindset to help security practitioners better prioritize their  remediation tasks with evidence-backed Verified Exploit Paths™. The efficient and scalable runtime protection, proven over 5 years and trusted by many of the world’s leading cloud enterprises, harnesses local, autonomous AI engines to detect and thwart runtime threats in real-time. CNAPP data and workload telemetry is recorded to SentinelOne’s unified security lake, for easy access and investigation.

    Singularity Cloud Security includes both agentless and AI-powered cloud security controls, which represent two halves of our strategy to keep public cloud and container environments safe. Radically reduce your cloud attack surface with Singularity Cloud Native Security, formerly PingSafe, with agentless insights and evidence-based prioritization; protect runtime compute and container with Singularity Cloud Workload Security, SentinelOne’s real-time CWPP, with AI-powered machine-speed blocking of threats.

    Aqua Security stops cloud native attacks, preventing them before they happen and stopping them when they happen. Dedicated cloud native threat research and the most loved cloud native security open source community in the world put innovation at your fingertips so you can transform your business. Born cloud native, The Aqua Platform is the most integrated Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), securing from day one and protecting in real-time. Aqua has been stopping real cloud native attacks on hundreds of thousands of production nodes across the world since 2015.

    Aqua Security Features

    Aqua Security has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Vulnerability scanning
    • Dynamic threat analysis
    • Automates DevSecOps
    • CI/CD integrations
    • Cloud security posture management
    • Kubernetes security
    • Hybrid and multi-cloud
    • Container security
    • Serverless security
    • VM security
    • Cloud workloads protection

    Aqua Security Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing Aqua Security. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Designed for scale and performance: The Aqua Security platform was designed to scale to the largest environments in order to protect huge clusters and massive DevOps pipelines.
    • Empowers DevOps to detect issues early and fix them fast: The solution was designed to help you solve issues immediately - before they cause greater damage to your organization. It helps you gain insight into your vulnerability posture and prioritize remediation and mitigation according to contextual risk.
    • Automated compliance and security posture: Aqua Security checks your cloud services, Infrastructure-as-code templates, and Kubernetes setup against best practices and standards. This way, you can ensure the infrastructure you run your applications on is securely configured and in compliance.
    • Artifact scanning: The Aqua Security platform scans artifacts for vulnerabilities, malware, and other risks during development and staging. It allows you to set flexible and dynamic policies to control deployment into your runtime environments.
    • Minimizes false positives: Aqua Security relies on a variety of sources and proprietary research to curate and present vulnerabilities in the most accurate way, which helps to minimize false positives and unnecessary noise in the pipeline.
    • Automated security testing: The Aqua Security platform automates security testing in your CI/CD pipeline, and continuously scans registries and serverless function stores to detect emerging risks. By implementing the platform, you can get actionable feedback within your CI environments to empower your organization’s developers to fix issues rapidly.
    • Granular controls: The solution provides protection for your VM, container, and serverless workloads using granular controls with instant visibility and real-time detection and response.
    • Sandboxed environment: With Aqua Security, you can run images in a secure sandboxed environment that traces indicators of compromise (IOCs) such as container escapes, reverse shell backdoors, malware drops, code injection backdoors, and network anomalies.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Lizeth Z., Cloud Security Specialist at Telstra, says, “Aqua Security is the most advanced solution in the market for container security. Aqua Security allows us to check for vulnerabilities in the CI/CD pipeline, so application teams can remediate issues before going into production. Aqua Security helps us to check the vulnerability of image assurance and check for malware.”

    Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is a cloud security solution used for cloud security posture management, cloud workload protection, container security, and code security. It provides visibility, monitoring, and alerting for security issues in multi-cloud environments. 

    The solution is user-friendly, easy to set up, and integrates with SIEM for generating alerts and reports. Its most valuable features include security features, monitoring capabilities, reporting, compliance monitoring, vulnerability dashboard, data security features, and multi-cloud capabilities. Prisma Cloud has helped organizations by providing comprehensive protection, automating workflows, simplifying troubleshooting, and improving collaboration between SecOps and DevOps.

    Prisma Cloud Features

    Prisma Cloud offers comprehensive security coverage in all areas of the cloud development lifecycle:

    • Code security: Protect configurations, scan code before it enters production, and integrate with other tools.

    • Security posture management: Monitor posture, identify and remove threats, and provide compliance across public clouds.

    • Workload protection: Secure hosts and containers across the application lifecycle.

    • Network security: Gain network visibility and enforce micro segmentation.

    • Identity security: Enforce permissions and secure identities across clouds.

    Benefits of Prisma Cloud

    • Unified management: All users use the same dashboards built via shared onboarding, allowing cloud security to be addressed from a single agent framework.

    • High-speed onboarding: Multiple cloud accounts and users are onboarded within seconds, rapidly activating integrated security capabilities.

    • Multiple integration options: Prisma Cloud can integrate with widely used IDE, SCM, and CI/CD workflows early in development, enabling users to identify and fix vulnerabilities and compliance issues before they enter production. Prisma Cloud supports all major workflows, automation frameworks, and third-party tools.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Prisma Cloud stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its integration capabilities, as well as its visibility, which makes it very easy for users to get a full picture of the cloud environment.

    Alex J., an information security manager at Cobalt.io, writes, “Prisma Cloud has enabled us to take a very strong preventive approach to cloud security. One of the hardest things with cloud is getting visibility into workloads. With Prisma Cloud, you can go in and get that visibility, then set up policies to alert on risky behavior, e.g., if there are security groups or firewall ports open up. So, it is very helpful in preventing configuration errors in the cloud by having visibility. If there are issues, then you can find them and fix them.”

    Luke L., a cloud security specialist for a financial services firm, writes, “You can also integrate with Amazon Managed Services. You can also get a snapshot in time, whether that's over a 24-hour period, seven days, or a month, to determine what the estate might look like at a certain point in time and generate reports from that for vulnerability management forums.”

    Sample Customers
    Information Not Available
    HPE Salesforce Telstra Ellie Mae Cathay Pacific HomeAway
    Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company27%
    Construction Company13%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Insurance Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company21%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Insurance Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company43%
    Insurance Company14%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Government6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company33%
    Manufacturing Company18%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Healthcare Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization14%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business40%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise40%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise61%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise6%
    Large Enterprise56%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise70%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise51%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise60%
    Buyer's Guide
    Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    786,957 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Aqua Cloud Security Platform is ranked 7th in Container Security with 16 reviews while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 1st in Container Security with 82 reviews. Aqua Cloud Security Platform is rated 8.0, while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Aqua Cloud Security Platform writes "Reliable with good container scanning and a straightforward setup". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks writes "The dashboard is very user-friendly and can be used to generate custom RQL based on user requirements". Aqua Cloud Security Platform is most compared with Wiz, Snyk, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, SUSE NeuVector and Sysdig Secure, whereas Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Wiz, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, AWS Security Hub, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security and AWS GuardDuty. See our Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report.

    See our list of best Container Security vendors, best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors, and best Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) vendors.

    We monitor all Container Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.