Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Tenable Security Center comparison

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Executive Summary
Updated on Jun 2, 2024

Tenable and Prisma Cloud offer strong security solutions with varying deployment times and pricing structures. Tenable focuses on customizable reporting and centralized management, while Prisma Cloud is praised for its multi-cloud visibility and threat detection capabilities.

  • Features: Tenable Security Center is lauded for its intuitive dashboard, accurate vulnerability scanning, customizable reporting, and centralized management. In contrast, Prisma Cloud stands out for its comprehensive multi-cloud visibility, ease of use, advanced threat detection, and automated compliance assessment capabilities.
  • Pricing and ROI: Tenable has varying opinions on pricing and setup cost, with some finding it reasonable while others find it expensive and complicated. In contrast, Prisma Cloud is perceived as competitive in pricing, with flexible licensing options. Tenable offers enhanced security posture and visibility, streamlined vulnerability management, and valuable risk assessment insights. Prisma Cloud provides significant cost savings, increased security measures, risk reduction, and compliance streamlining.
  • Room for Improvement: Tenable users have highlighted the need for a more intuitive UI, enhanced customization options for reports, and better integrations. In contrast, Prisma Cloud users have mentioned the desire improved documentation and training resources, and enhanced alerting and reporting capabilities.
  • Deployment and customer support: Overall, users seem to have experienced longer deployment times with Tenable Security Center (around three months), with an additional setup phase. Both solutions were praised for responsiveness, helpfulness, and expertise in their customer support.

The summary above is based on 140 interviews we conducted recently with Tenable Security Center and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.

To learn more, read our detailed Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs. Tenable Security Center Report (Updated: May 2024).
786,957 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Prisma Cloud provides the needed visibility and control regardless of how complex and distributed the cloud environments become.""CSPM is the most valuable feature for any organization that runs its workloads in the cloud.""The initial setup is seamless.""I find the CSPM area to be a more valuable and flexible feature.""It supports the multi-cloud environment beautifully.""I like Prisma's ability to integrate with other tools. We can integrate it with Jira so that when Prisma triggers an alert, it opens a ticket in Jira. That was a big selling point for the product. There's a feature called the guest custom template that allows you to trigger alerts in Jira based on the template. That can also be added as a feature on Jira.""We found it to be easy and flexible. We could easily configure it for our needs, and we could spread the Prisma Cloud platform to 16 countries without encountering any kind of problem.""Prisma scans things and shows all the vulnerabilities and packages that are vulnerable, and which layers, by default, have vulnerabilities. So developers can easily go into the package or a particular layer and make changes to their code. It's very transparent."

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"What is useful to me is being able to fulfill very customized scanning policies. In the clinical environment, because of vendor control, we can't perform credential-vulnerability scanning. And network scans, which I've done before, can cause a lot of impact. Being able to create very customized policies to be able to routinely scan and audit our clinical networks, while simultaneously not causing impact, is important to us.""We use Tenable to scan all of our environments and plugins for vulnerabilities. Tenable helps us discover network vulnerabilities to threats and piracy.""Initial setup was pretty straightforward.""The solution is completely stable and operation is user-friendly.""I like Tenable.sc's analytics and reporting. You can also configure your on-prem network monitors to talk to your Tenable.sc control panel.""One of the most valuable features is their distributed scan model for allotting engines to work together as a pool and handle multiple scans at once, across multiple environments. Automatic scanning distribution is a distinguishing feature of their toolset.""I find Tenable SC to be a very scalable product.""Compliance and vulnerability scans are most valuable. Compliance scan helps in validating how our teams are complying, and vulnerability scan helps in future-proofing. Its vulnerability detection is accurate."

More Tenable Security Center Pros →

Cons
"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.""Prisma Cloud's dashboards should be customizable. That's very important. Other similar solutions are more elastic so you have the power to create customized dashboards. In Prisma Cloud, you cannot do that.""The licensing is a bit confusing.""Though Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks provides excellent security, is a pioneer in this space, and knows what it's doing, from a user perspective, it would have been better if it was a little easier to use.""Prisma Cloud supports generating CSV files, but I would also like it to generate PDF files for reporting.""The challenge that Palo Alto and Prisma have is that, at times, the instructions in an event are a little bit dated and they're not usable. That doesn't apply to all the instructions, but there are times where, for example, the Microsoft or the Amazon side has made some changes and Palo Alto or Prisma was not aware of them. So as we try to remediate an alert in such a case, the instructions absolutely do not work. Then we open up a ticket and they'll reply, "Oh yeah, the API for so-and-so vendor changed and we'll have to work with them on that." That area could be done a little better.""The automation capabilities are growing each day, but the problem is that the updates are not that frequent. There are some services on Amazon that have come out with updates, and Azure is also getting up to date. But Prisma takes some time to follow. There's a time gap that Prisma inherits from these clouds. I understand why it takes some time, but that time should be reduced.""We'd like to have more native integration with clouds and additional security checks in the future."

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"I will say it's a lot slower compared to an MS scan. It takes so much longer, so the performance could definitely be worked on.""The web application is not very functional.""Deploying Tenable.sc is highly complex because it's an on-prem solution, whereas Tenable.io is cloud-based, so you can go live as soon as you log in. Tenable.sc involves significant integration with other on-prem solutions, and the deployment takes about two to three weeks with the help of a system integrator""The pricing is reasonable, but this could be brought down more aggressively, such as we see with Rapid7, Tenable SC's main competitor.""There's a lot of information being streamed out of the reports. What would be nice, and maybe we just haven't found it, would be more of an executive-type view. We still expect it to collect all this information, but we would like a feature that would allow us to show it to an executive or a director or someone like that and give them some type of high-level overview but not get into the nitty-gritty.""If I want to have a very low-managed scan policy, it's a lot of work to create something which is very basic. If I use a tool like Nmap, all I have to do is download it, install it, type in the command, and it's good to go. In Security Center, I have to go through a lot of work to create a policy that's very basic.""Tenable SC could be improved with additional connectivity to external company postures and the capability of managing and sustaining agents in the systems directly without additional platforms in the middle.""In terms of configuration, there is some level of flexibility that we are not able to achieve."

More Tenable Security Center Cons →

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 →

  • "It is slightly more expensive than other solutions in the same sphere."
  • "We're able to save because we don't have to employ more staff members to help wit ht he scheduling of the scans, running the reports or sending them out to the systems owners. That alone is a big ROI for us."
  • "The licensing costs for this solution are approximately $100,000 US, and I think that covers everything."
  • "The pricing is more than Nexpose."
  • "Costing is pretty reasonable compared to the competition."
  • "We're a Fortune 500 company... our licensing costs [are] in the seven figures."
  • "We pay around 60,000 on a yearly basis."
  • "The price can start at €10,000 ($13,000 USD) for between 500 and 1,000 assets, and the price can climb into the millions as more assets are added."
  • More Tenable Security Center Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    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 are able to easily see where our container vulnerabilities lie and and where cloud… more »
    Top 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… more »
    Top Answer:The tool's dashboard and reporting capabilities match our company's needs since we are able to modify the basic view to create a new dashboard, and it works out very well for our needs.
    Top Answer:I rate the solution's price as seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. The tool is quite expensive.
    Top Answer:The tool's initial configuration is not so easy. The hardware requirements related to the tool need to be better because we need a lot of memory to achieve speed in the solution. If our company needs… more »
    Ranking
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    8.4
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    Also Known As
    Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud, Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
    Tenable.sc, Tenable Unified Security, Tenable SecurityCenter
    Learn More
    Overview

    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.”

    Get a risk-based view of your IT, security and compliance posture so you can quickly identify, investigate and prioritize your most critical assets and vulnerabilities.

    Managed on-premises and powered by Nessus technology, the Tenable Security Center (formerly Tenable.sc) suite of products provides the industry’s most comprehensive vulnerability coverage with real-time continuous assessment of your network. It’s your complete end-to-end vulnerability management solution.

    Sample Customers
    Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
    IBM, Sempra Energy, Microsoft, Apple, Adidas, Union Pacific
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company33%
    Manufacturing Company18%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Healthcare Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization14%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm31%
    Comms Service Provider15%
    Manufacturing Company15%
    Computer Software Company12%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization17%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Government12%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise51%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise60%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business35%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise46%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise54%
    Buyer's Guide
    Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs. Tenable Security Center
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs. Tenable Security Center and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    786,957 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 1st in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 82 reviews while Tenable Security Center is ranked 11th in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 48 reviews. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4, while Tenable Security Center is rated 8.2. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tenable Security Center writes "A security solution for vulnerability assessment with automated scans". Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Wiz, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Aqua Cloud Security Platform, AWS Security Hub and CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, whereas Tenable Security Center is most compared with Tenable Vulnerability Management, Qualys VMDR, Rapid7 InsightVM, Tenable Nessus and XM Cyber. See our Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs. Tenable Security Center report.

    See our list of best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) 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.