AppDynamics vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

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18,890 views|12,224 comparisons
89% willing to recommend
Palo Alto Networks Logo
19,723 views|11,024 comparisons
97% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Mar 13, 2024

AppDynamics and Prisma Cloud are both popular among users for their valuable features, ease of use, and positive outcomes. While AppDynamics is praised for its detailed analytics and reporting capabilities, Prisma Cloud stands out for its comprehensive security capabilities and automated compliance assessment. Users have noted that the pricing and licensing options for both products are fair and transparent. However, AppDynamics users have highlighted the need for a more intuitive interface and better integration with other systems, while Prisma Cloud users have mentioned the importance of enhancing alerting and reporting functionality.

  • Features: AppDynamics stands out for real-time performance visibility and detailed analytics, while Prisma Cloud excels in comprehensive security, threat detection, automated compliance assessment, and multi-cloud environment control. Both offer intuitive interfaces.
  • Pricing and ROI: AppDynamics and Prisma Cloud offer competitive pricing, with reasonable setup costs and flexible licensing. AppDynamics yielded high ROI through efficiency and performance enhancements. Prisma Cloud focused on cost savings and security measures.
  • Room for Improvement: AppDynamics could improve by simplifying the UI, and adding more customization options. Prisma Cloud users seek a more intuitive UI, better integration, improved documentation, and enhanced alerting and reporting features.
  • Deployment and customer support: The reviews for AppDynamics show a mix of timelines for new tech solution implementation, with some taking months while others taking weeks. Prisma Cloud mention longer deployment times but shorter setup phases compared to AppDynamics. AppDynamics excels in prompt and knowledgeable assistance, with friendly representatives. Prisma Cloud receives consistently positive feedback for its responsive and effective support, showcasing high expertise and reliability in addressing issues.

The summary above is based on 136 interviews we conducted recently with AppDynamics and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.

To learn more, read our detailed Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Report (Updated: May 2024).
771,212 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
"Once you get past installation, AppDynamics is highly stable and we get good results.""After a major incident, root cause analysis is conducted and, most of the time, we understand what caused the incident and how it can be prevented from happening again.""We're a large organization, so we appreciate AppDynamics' wide coverage. It may not work in all areas, but it has broad coverage. We can use the same dataset for different use case aspects. That is the beauty of AppDynamics. You can coordinate APM, EUM, and infrastructure through one dataset.""The most valuable feature is the live reporting on the current health\performance of our application""We set up alerts recently so we can fix any issues more quickly in production.""The best features of AppDynamics would be the code application monitoring capabilities.""Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic.""After we implemented this solution, we can easily determine the root cause of issues."

More AppDynamics Pros →

"One of the main reasons we like Prisma Cloud so much is that they also provide an API. You can't expect to give someone an account on Prisma Cloud, or on any tool for that matter, and say, "Go find your things and fix them." It doesn't work like that... We pull down the information from the API that Prisma Cloud provides, which is multi-cloud, multi-account—hundreds and hundreds of different types of alerts graded by severity—and then we can clearly identify that these alerts belong to these people, and they're the people who must remediate them.""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.""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.""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.""It has helped us understand the dynamic topology of our containers, and manage security through the application of policies that our pipelines apply straight from Git.""Its ease of integration is valuable because we need to get the solution out of the door quickly, so speed and ease matter.""The support is excellent.""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."

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Cons
"Its resiliency can be improved. We're told that the best we can do with an on-prem solution is to have a hot standby that requires a manual switchover. So, it is a do-it-yourself Ikea model of maintaining data consistency between two servers, without having low balance or failover considerations for an on-prem solution.""Regarding Search Guard functionality, there is room for improvement.""The resolution time takes longer than expected.""Maybe some more CPU power or something like that could be an area to improve.""I would like to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning brought in to monitor the statement and payment sum issues we have.""One area for improvement is the MST model. It would be more helpful if it could be offered as a managed service provider model with more multi-tenancy and features.""AppDynamics is a solution that requires extra learning and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, automated reports would helpful similar to have they have in Google Analytics.""There could be some improvement in the constructions of the diagrams, it is too difficult currently."

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"The access controls for our bank roles were not granular enough. We needed specific people to do particular actions, and we often had to give some people way too much access for them to be able to do what they needed in Prisma. They couldn't do their jobs if they didn't have that level of access, so other people had to do that part for them. It would help to have more granular role-based access controls.""In terms of securing cloud-native development at build time, a lot of improvement is needed. Currently, it's more a runtime solution than a build-time solution. For runtime, I would rate it at seven out of 10, but for build-time there is a lot of work to be done.""The information presented in the UI sometimes doesn't look intuitive enough.""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.""This solution is more AWS and Azure-centric. It needs to be more specific on the GCP side, which they are working on.""Prisma Cloud supports generating CSV files, but I would also like it to generate PDF files for reporting.""We have discovered that Prisma is not functioning properly with GCP.""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."

More Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The product’s licencing policy is competitive. However, properly identify and size your needs to get the best rate."
  • "As a technical person, and as an application development team, they all understand that this is the right tool for us. But when it comes to budget and financial matters, it takes days and weeks to convince upper management to buy this tool. So they should do something more on licensing costs."
  • "It is not a cheap tool, but you also save in manpower to setup because it is easy and fast. At the end of the day, I think the revenue is much better. BUT, they have an awful co-term mode of licensing."
  • "It could be cheaper. It's a little cost prohibitive. There are so many features that also show a lot of value, but it’s not always easy to justify the cost."
  • "Because it is priced per JVM, the price can increase pretty fast, into the millions. We have had challenges because we had to justify the price to our clients, as well, when we are putting in certain tools."
  • "It would be better if there were more solutions incorporated into the base price. ​"
  • "The way it is structured in terms of price could be better. You pay for individual modules and that adds on to the cost, which detracts you from implementing those modules and slows you down."
  • "Take into consideration what you get for specific pricing models and how much it costs to add on things you may need later.​"
  • More AppDynamics 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:There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra… more »
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    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 »
    Ranking
    Views
    18,890
    Comparisons
    12,224
    Reviews
    21
    Average Words per Review
    462
    Rating
    8.0
    Views
    19,723
    Comparisons
    11,024
    Reviews
    54
    Average Words per Review
    1,122
    Rating
    8.4
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    AppD, AppDynamics APM
    Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud, Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
    Learn More
    Overview

    AppDynamics is a leader in APM (application performance monitoring) tools. The solution is designed to help you spot application issues on the spot so you can get to the root causes of problems, all in real time. In addition, AppDynamics offers seamless traceability and is fully capable of enhancing application performance and visibility in the multicloud world. It uses AI to solve application problems and prevent them from occurring in the future. AppDynamics is a great tool that can help your organization make critical, strategic decisions and is ideal for businesses of all sizes.

    AppDynamics Features

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

    • Code level visibility
    • Dynamic baselining
    • Powerful alerting
    • Visibility and control
    • Quick installation
    • Mobile real-user monitoring
    • Browser real-user monitoring
    • Application performance management
    • Database agents
    • Server visibility
    • Trend database performance over time
    • Data retention
    • Monitors multiple platforms
    • Troubleshoots performance issues
    • Synthetic monitoring
    • Continuously monitors in a high-volume environment

    AppDynamics Benefits

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

    • Deep insights: The AppDynamics solution can provide deep insights into your processes, including real-time insights into performance, user experience, objectives, and business outcomes.
    • Unified monitoring: With AppDynamics, six monitoring applications are combined into a single robust solution. In turn, you gain complete visibility and multi-channel user experience management. The solution’s unified monitoring also quickly produces previews that are more accurate.
    • Data-led customer experience: By using AppDynamics, you can ingest and analyze data across your entire technology stack and transform it into detailed visualizations. This allows you to easily make the right business decisions while enhancing the user experience and also driving better business results.
    • Advanced network visibility: AppDynamics allows you to gain insight across your entire technology stack. As a result, you have greater visibility of the external networks that your applications rely on, which enables you to quickly resolve issues with connections to Domain Name Service (DNS), Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the AppDynamics solution.

    Chandan K., Associate Director at a financial services firm, says, “The tracing is the most important aspect of the solution. The way it traces the information within the particular application or within the particular infrastructure is great. That actually helps. Apart from that, all of the data that's in the production APM is good.”

    PeerSpot user, Yacin H., Responsable Commercial at Zen Networks, mentions, “You can use one module for each server, for each application, and for each API”. He also adds, “With the solution you can put add-ons on it and it's very customizable. You can customize it easily. If you want something that the tool doesn't have, you can add it easily.”

    Another reviewer, a Head Of Information Technology at a mining and metals company expresses, "The solution helps us save a lot of time on certain tasks. The dashboards of the solution are excellent. The stability is good.”

    David G., Systems Engineer at a tech services company, states, “The solution has beneficial application analysis, is highly scalable, and has a great ROI.”

    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
    Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers
    Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm32%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Aerospace/Defense Firm6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization41%
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company33%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Manufacturing Company18%
    Healthcare Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization14%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise69%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business8%
    Midsize Enterprise46%
    Large Enterprise46%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise52%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise61%
    Buyer's Guide
    Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: May 2024.
    771,212 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 155 reviews while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 1st in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 82 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". 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". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Datadog, Splunk Enterprise Security and New Relic, whereas 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.

    We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability 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.