We compared Cato Networks and Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Comparison Results: When comparing Cato Networks and Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks, Cato Networks is praised for its easy setup, simplicity, and speed. It offers useful features like always-on VPN, web filtering, and antivirus capabilities. However, it lacks advanced networking features and a web application firewall. In contrast, Prisma Access is highly regarded for its user-friendly interface, security features, and integration capabilities. It may be difficult to use and configure, and its pricing is considered higher. Customer service and support for both products have received mixed feedback, with potential for improvement in response time and expertise for Prisma Access.
"The solution is stable."
"On the outside, the main differentiation is because Lookout ingest. They have ingested basically all of the apps for the last ten years and all the versions of all the apps, and we have that in a corporate database that allows us to do very large-scale machine learning and analysis on that data set. That's not something that any of the competitors really have the capability to do because they don't have access to the data set. A lot of the apps you can no longer get them because that version of the app is five or six years old, and it just doesn't exist anywhere anymore, except within our infrastructure. So, the ability to have that very rich dataset and learn from that dataset is a real differentiator."
"The most valuable features are the antivirus as a whole, the anti-malware, and all of the protection features that scan our enterprise devices."
"The protection offered by the product is the most valuable feature. It detects vulnerabilities or traps on our users' phones and then prompts them to clean up their devices. Tools we used previously would only discover, which required us to gather information on the backend, so Lookout is a welcome upgrade."
"We appreciate the optimization and acceleration of the performance of SDP users."
"The scalability is quite good."
"The most valuable feature is that it also works as a next-gen firewall because it has security features."
"When I first encountered Cato, I didn't know how to use it, but after a week of training, I could onboard our systems to it, so the solution was easy to learn and navigate."
"It's a pretty straightforward solution."
"The product is efficient and easy to use."
"It is quite simple and easy to use."
"The WAN aggregation feature is the most valuable."
"A feature I've found very helpful is run time security because most of the products on the market will look at security during the build time, and they don't really look at what happens once you're going into production."
"Overall, the cost savings, ease of deployment, and better VPN user experience and performance are valuable."
"Prisma Access provides comprehensive security. It provides URL filtering, application control, SSL, DLP, etc. It provides complete security for the cloud environment."
"It has predefined or preconfigured rules, which are getting periodically updated. They are providing continuous improvements and periodically updating all search queries that they are looking for. That is one thing that helps us to stay vigilant and focused. If we query our AWS account for any breaches or vulnerabilities with any of the cloud tests, and it alerts us based on these predefined rules. It also provides an option to configure our own rules, and based on these rules, it can query the cloud trail logs, pull the information, and trigger alerts in real-time. I haven't explored this feature much because there are multiple accounts, and we don't have enough time to explore this feature. It also provides multiple integrations. When vulnerabilities or breaches are happening, you should be aware of them immediately. It provides integration with tools such as Slack, PagerDuty so that you can get alerted as soon as the high severity stuff comes up. For example, you have a security group that has allowed public traffic on port 22. As TechOps, you should be aware of this immediately. You cannot scan each machine or look into all security groups to identify it. So, Prisma helps us and alerts us when this kind of high-priority stuff comes up. It has different statistics, analytics, and graphs for data. The description of alerts is also pretty good. They describe what are the possible causes for this and what are the solutions. From Prisma Cloud, you can directly go to the AWS account. When you click on an alert, a resource, or a resource ID, it takes you to the AWS console where you need to log in. If you are already logged in, it will take you to that instance directly, and you can fix the issue there. I have found this feature very useful."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to join your network and provide access through the VPN."
"The scalability of the solution is excellent."
"Prisma helped us build a moat around our production systems. It's now impossible to log into our production from a non-MDM laptop. Prisma Access provides decent security overall."
"Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks is a seamless solution."
"The stability depends on the service from where you access it. Because sometimes, the place you are in, you have Gateway. You don't have Gateway. The gateway is overutilized. At the end, you need to go through their gateways. And this is the key point here. You have a tracking point. If it's not well orchestrated, and it scales up as you add more to the existing team, you will suffer"
"From the analysis that we've done, they do seem to be maybe a step behind in trying to enter the market with a new solution. But when they do pick up, they do come out with some good products."
"We just submitted an enhancement request reflecting the main area we want to see improvement in; the APIs. Currently, we're able to build dashboards, but it's somewhat backward because we use our MDM API to create them. Lookout should provide API to customers so we can query our data and use it in our cloud, and this is the only outstanding area for improvement with the product right now."
"Lookout was moving into the SSE space. And so their work on SecureWeb Gateway and SD-WAN is still sort of evolving."
"Cato Networks security could be better."
"The solution could be made more user friendly for the administrator to use the portal. It is difficult to use it for people who are not experienced with Cato Networks."
"I would like to see better integration with identity providers."
"Web application firewalling (WAF) is a feature we would like to have in this solution and does not exist yet."
"Cato Networks could improve their intrusion detection. There is not a lot in place."
"They should include a web application firewall feature in the solution."
"The product must evolve into the endpoint domain."
"The tool needs to be more granular. Its reports are not very in-depth."
"When we deploy firewall rules via Panorama, we find it's a little bit slow. We have a global environment and might have 100 gateways or VPNs in the cloud. When we deploy something, it tries to deploy it one-by-one, and that can be slow."
"We are using the SaaS offering. We use our applications for microservices. We use Twistlock to scan containers, and it displays these results in Prisma, which is a good feature because we can see vulnerabilities with respect to these containers. We can see everything in a very detailed manner. However, when you have different environments for a single application, such as DEV, QA, PROD, and TEST, all these environments run multiple containers, which can lead to a very high number of containers. In such a scenario, it shows you the alerts for all those containers that have vulnerabilities. If you show the results of all the containers that share the same image, it is not going to add any value. Therefore, they should narrow down the alerts based on a container. It should show information for a single container. Otherwise, the person who is looking at the results gets the impression that he has to fix all these issues. This is something that they can improve."
"Palo Alto Prisma 10 came out over a year ago. Palo Alto added this identity management feature. The legacy way Palo Alto selected which user is sitting on an IP address it passes through has been clunky."
"The documentation is generally good, but they could provide a more detailed description of all the configuration steps. I have to search for information or call support. Palo Alto could add more knowledge base articles about configuration with screenshots and walkthroughs. That would be helpful. When configuring a product, you want to see examples of how it is done."
"My clients would like to see a more feature-rich product."
"The licensing model isn't flexible enough. It's an all-or-nothing model. Other providers in the market allow you to buy modules or add-ons separately. With Prisma Access, you have to purchase the same module for all users."
"It applies commits to the firewalls slowly. There isn't an API you can use for anything. We've previously had trouble with the egress IP addresses though we expressed to engineering that those mustn't change. They changed several times without warning, causing a lot of headaches."
"Sometimes, you have these notifications sent out about changes in App-IDs, modifications in App-IDs, or even the introduction of entirely new App-IDs to replace. Sometimes, the recommendations are followed, but even then, when the package is installed on the firewall, it gets messed up. I remember a particular one was with Tableau, and suddenly, people weren't able to use Tableau, which is an analytics tool for business."
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Cato SASE Cloud Platform is ranked 5th in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with 21 reviews while Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 1st in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) with 59 reviews. Cato SASE Cloud Platform is rated 8.8, while Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cato SASE Cloud Platform writes "Useful remote worker VPN, centralized management, and simple on-boarding process". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks writes "Integration with Palo Alto platforms such as Cortex Data Lake and Autofocus gives us visibility into our attack surface". Cato SASE Cloud Platform is most compared with Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, Cisco SD-WAN, Fortinet FortiGate, VMware SD-WAN and Cisco Umbrella, whereas Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, Netskope , Cisco Umbrella, Zscaler Internet Access and Microsoft Azure VPN Gateway. See our Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs. Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks report.
See our list of best Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) vendors, best Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB) vendors, and best ZTNA as a Service vendors.
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