Illumio vs Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks comparison

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3,936 views|3,001 comparisons
85% willing to recommend
Palo Alto Networks Logo
25,703 views|14,353 comparisons
97% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 5, 2023

We performed a comparison between Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation and Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Features: Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation offers monitoring capabilities, automated policy writing, and visibility into application communication. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks offers comprehensive visibility, robust management capabilities, continuous cloud compliance monitoring, and seamless integration with other tools. Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation could improve by expanding its compatibility with various operating systems. It should also prioritize data security and develop more efficient agents for on-premise environments. Prisma Cloud would benefit from enhancements in customization and workflow automation. The platform should also strive for more comprehensive coverage across multiple cloud vendors.
  • Service and Support: Some users were pleased with the Illumio support team's promptness and round-the-clock. There were also complaints about unhelpful responses and delays. While some customers were satisfied with Palo Alto's exceptional support and consistent communication, others reported slow response times.
  • Ease of Deployment: The initial installation of Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation took users a few days, and the total deployment time is around six months. Prisma Cloud takes users a few hours to install, and the total deployment time ranges from several weeks or months, depending on the environment. Customization and policy writing required extra personnel.
  • Pricing: Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation is costly. It requires a subscription, which users can renew annually or every three years. Some users found Prisma Cloud reasonable and competitive, while others view it as expensive. Most said the cost was justified by its extensive feature set.
  • ROI: Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation users said that the ROI was challenging to quantify. Users reported that Prisma Cloud effectively prevented breaches, streamlined operations, enhanced detection and alert time, reduced expenses, and boosted productivity.

Comparison Results: Our users prefer Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks over Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation for its comprehensive visibility and management capabilities. Users like its ease of use, continuous cloud compliance monitoring, and security controls. Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation lacks some of Prisma Cloud's more advanced features and is limited in its ability to support a wider range of operating systems. Palo Alto's customer service was also rated better than Illumio's.

To learn more, read our detailed Illumio vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks Report (Updated: March 2024).
767,319 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
"It has helped us to understand internal network visibility and firewall policy implementation. We use the product to simplify firewall policy implementation.""The Explorer allows you to know the traffic between source and destination.""The most valuable feature of Illumio Adaptive Security Platform is monitoring. When I have no requirement from the other application, I can use the web block traffic to build.""The features that I have found most useful is the ability to centralize all the rules and then distribute them across various locations. However, I've encountered challenges related to tagging policies, which can be complex to devise. It's a matter that requires careful consideration and stakeholder involvement before implementing such policies.""The solution is easy to use.""The product provides visibility into how the applications communicate and how the network protocols are being used.""The solution helps to maintain logs and monitor activities. It also helps us with access management. The tool helps us to secure organizational data that include files.""The flexibility of the solution is its most valuable feature."

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"I was looking for a vulnerability scanner and I was looking for one place in which I could find everything. This tool not only does vulnerability scanning, but it also gives me an asset management tool.""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 found the network queue sets useful. I also liked the Workload Protection Module, the vulnerability findings, and how the rule sets handle the vulnerabilities based on severity.""CSPM is the most valuable feature.""The product is quite good for providing multi-clouds or cross-cloud security from a single-pane -of-glass.""The most valuable features are the alerts and auto-remediation because it allows us a lot of flexibility to customize and do things the Palo Alto team never intended. We faced some challenges with certificates because we also have next-gen firewalls. We would like to equip all the traffic because there have been many cases in which the developers have done things by mistake. Deploying certificates on virtual machines can be complex in a development environment, but we managed to do that with Prisma Cloud.""It provides insights into potential vulnerabilities in our code, helping us identify and rectify issues before they can be exploited.""The runtime mechanism on the solution is very useful. It's got very good network mapping between containers. If you have more than one container, you can create a content data link between them."

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Cons
"The interaction we've had with the support team hasn't been ideal. Technical support should be improved.""I would like to see better data security in the product.""The solution is very basic and doesn't do anything other than the orchestration of layer four endpoint firewall rules.""It requires a low-level re-architecting of the product.""The product’s agents don't work very well in OT environments.""Some of the features that can be improved is offer additional guidance on creating an effective and risk-free tagging policy would be highly beneficial.""The customer service is lagging a bit. It could be better.""Illumio Adaptive Security Platform could improve by supporting more operating systems. For example, Cisco and Apache appliances."

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"This solution is more AWS and Azure-centric. It needs to be more specific on the GCP side, which they are working on.""Sometimes, when you assign subnets to regions, the IP address will jump from one location to another because it will automatically change substantially. Then, we need to add those IP subnets to our firewall for existing access. The need to update those subnets potentially causes maintenance or access issues. So far, we can only provide bigger customers with six subnets, and a small company may not be able to access those services.""Support is an area that needs improvement.""Prisma Cloud lags behind in terms of security automation capabilities.""They are missing some compatibility details in their documentation.""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.""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.""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."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "There is a subscription needed to use Illumio Adaptive Security Platform and we pay every three years. Overall the solution is expensive."
  • "The product's pricing is around 10,000-15,000 USD. The pricing is on a yearly basis."
  • More Illumio 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 features that I have found most useful is the ability to centralize all the rules and then distribute them across various locations. However, I've encountered challenges related to tagging… more »
    Top Answer:The product's pricing is around 10,000-15,000 USD. The pricing is on a yearly basis.
    Top Answer:Some of the features that can be improved is offer additional guidance on creating an effective and risk-free tagging policy would be highly beneficial.
    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
    3,936
    Comparisons
    3,001
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    384
    Rating
    8.0
    Views
    25,703
    Comparisons
    14,353
    Reviews
    53
    Average Words per Review
    1,120
    Rating
    8.4
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Illumio Adaptive Security Platform, Illumio ASP
    Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud, Prisma Public Cloud, RedLock Cloud 360, RedLock, Twistlock, Aporeto
    Learn More
    Overview

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation is a cloud and data center security solution that helps stop breaches from spreading across hybrid and multi cloud IT environments. The solution is designed to stop ransomware, contain cyber attacks, and reduce risk. With Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, users can understand relationships and communications to map exposure risk of systems and data, identify the right security posture and secure applications through least-privilege policies, and ensure a Zero Trust security posture.

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation Features

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Scalability: Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation scales up to 200,000 managed workloads or over 700,000 unmanaged workloads. These workloads can be in the cloud, on-premises, and in hybrid environments.
    • Single pane of visibility: The solution’s single pane of visibility improves your security posture and ability to prevent and respond rapidly to cyberattacks.
    • Simplicity: With Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, setting up groups and tags is simple. The solution is easy to integrate with next-generation firewalls and can also integrate with IT service management tools to import workload tags to provide more context to workloads.
    • Ransomware containment: The solution provides enforcement boundaries to contain attackers from moving laterally across your organization, enabling security architects to immediately isolate any workload or endpoint compromised in an attack. Enforcement boundaries can be activated instantly through scripts or by manual control, isolating workloads and endpoints already infected from spreading across the organization.

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Visibility everywhere: The Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation solution helps ensure that every interaction on your network is accounted for. 
    • Least-privilege access: By implementing Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, your organization can prevent unexpected breaches from propagating.
    • Adaptability and consistency: The solution guarantees consistent network behavior everywhere. 
    • Proactive posture: Using the solution enables your organization to always be on the lookout for an attack. 
    • Improve breach containment: With the solution, you can prevent unauthorized lateral movement and reduce your blast radius. Creating micro-perimeters around specific assets breaks up your attack surface and gives you the granular control needed to contain breaches.
    • Streamline policy management: The solution enables organizations to decouple segmentation from the underlying network to define policies based on the language that IT uses. Illumio's human-readable labels make policy creation much simpler and faster than traditional network segmentation approaches like VLANs, IP addresses, and port numbers.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Some of its major advantages are that it has a good auto policy writing feature, great mapping, and useful monitoring. 

    Shashi, Technical Consultant at a financial services firm, explains which features she really likes. “The auto policy writing is great. The feature will give you the option of inbound-outbound traffic. The Explorer allows you to know the traffic between source and destination. The illumination definitely stands out. Mapping is great. The application group mapping is useful.”

    The solution has “helpful support, useful monitoring, and high availability,” according to Edwin L., Security Architect at MGM.

    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
    Plantronics, NTT Innovation Institute Inc.
    Amgen, Genpact, Western Asset, Zipongo, Proofpoint, NerdWallet, Axfood, 21st Century Fox, Veeva Systems, Reinsurance Group of America
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company16%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company32%
    Manufacturing Company17%
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Healthcare Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company13%
    Educational Organization13%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise63%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise69%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise52%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise61%
    Buyer's Guide
    Illumio vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Illumio vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    767,319 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Illumio is ranked 14th in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 8 reviews while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 1st in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) with 81 reviews. Illumio is rated 8.0, while Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Illumio writes "Pprevents attackers or threats from spreading or moving laterally". 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". Illumio is most compared with Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, VMware NSX, Cisco Secure Workload, Zscaler Internet Access and Vectra AI, 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. See our Illumio vs. Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks report.

    See our list of best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) 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.