Prisma Cloud vs Aqua vs Wiz vs Sysdig: CNAPP Compared

Every cloud security vendor now calls itself a CNAPP, a Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform. The label is real: it means one product that folds together posture management, workload protection, entitlements, and increasingly runtime detection, instead of four separate tools. The problem is that Prisma Cloud, Aqua, Wiz, and Sysdig all wear the CNAPP badge while approaching the job from very different starting points.

Pick based on the badge and you will overpay for capabilities you do not use, or miss the one that actually matters for your environment. Here is what each platform is genuinely good at, and who should choose which.

What CNAPP has to cover

A complete CNAPP spans a few pillars: CSPM (cloud posture and misconfigurations), CWPP (workload and container protection), CIEM (cloud entitlements and identity), code and pipeline scanning, and CDR (cloud detection and response at runtime). No vendor is equally strong across all of them, and their origins tell you where their strength lies.

Wiz: agentless-first, built for speed to value

Wiz grew fast for one reason: it reads your cloud through an agentless, snapshot-based scan and builds a graph of how risks connect. Instead of a flat list of thousands of findings, it surfaces attack paths, the toxic combinations of exposure, identity, and vulnerability that actually lead to a breach. Time to first value is short because there are no agents to roll out. The tradeoff is that a purely agentless model gives you less deep, continuous runtime visibility than an agent does, which is why Wiz has been adding runtime sensors.

Sysdig: runtime detection is the whole point

Sysdig comes from the opposite direction. It was built by the creators of Falco, the open-source runtime security engine, and its strength is deep, real-time detection of what is actually happening inside running workloads. If your priority is catching an active attack in a container the moment it deviates from normal, and doing incident response with rich runtime forensics, Sysdig is the specialist. Its posture and agentless coverage exist, but runtime and cloud detection and response are the core.

Aqua: full container and cloud-native lifecycle

Aqua is one of the original container security companies, and it covers the whole lifecycle from build to runtime. It has strong open-source roots as well: Trivy, the widely used vulnerability scanner, and Tracee both come from Aqua. Teams that are deeply container and Kubernetes-centric and want image scanning, supply-chain checks, and runtime protection under one roof gravitate here.

Prisma Cloud: breadth over specialization

Prisma Cloud, from Palo Alto Networks, is the broad, mature, enterprise platform. Assembled partly from the Twistlock and RedLock acquisitions, it aims to cover every CNAPP pillar across code, cloud, and runtime in a single suite. Its strength is breadth and integration into a larger Palo Alto security stack. Its reputation for depth comes with a reputation for complexity and cost, so it fits large enterprises with the team to run it more than a lean startup.

The honest comparison

Platform	Core strength	Primary approach	Best fit
Wiz	Agentless risk graph, attack paths	Agentless-first	Fast, broad visibility with minimal rollout
Sysdig	Runtime detection and response	Agent / runtime (Falco)	Active-threat detection in running workloads
Aqua	Container lifecycle security	Build-to-runtime	Container and Kubernetes-centric teams
Prisma Cloud	All-pillar breadth	Comprehensive suite	Large enterprises wanting one platform

A note on pricing

None of these four publish simple public pricing, and all sell enterprise contracts negotiated on cloud footprint, workloads, and modules. Expect quotes to vary widely based on the number of accounts, workloads, and which pillars you turn on. When you evaluate, price the specific modules you will actually use rather than the full platform, and put the agentless-versus-agent operational cost into the comparison, not just the license.

Build vs buy: what Trivy and Falco actually cost you

Two of these four platforms started as commercial wrappers around open-source projects that are still free and still widely deployed on their own: Aqua built on top of Trivy (vulnerability scanning), and Sysdig built on top of Falco (runtime detection). A real question for any team sizing this decision is whether to self-host Trivy and Falco directly instead of buying a CNAPP at all.

The install cost is genuinely zero. The maintenance cost is not. Running Falco well across a mid-sized fleet, on the order of 50 to 200 nodes, typically runs 20 to 40 engineer-hours a month of steady-state platform work: tuning detection rules so they do not drown the team in false positives, wiring Falcosidekick or an equivalent into your SIEM, triaging alerts, staffing on-call for runtime detections, and keeping rules current as new attack techniques and CVEs show up. Trivy's ongoing burden is smaller, since vulnerability scanning is closer to a solved, low-noise problem, but it still needs someone to own scan scheduling, policy-as-code gates in CI, and keeping the vulnerability database current.

None of that engineering time shows up on an invoice, which is exactly why teams underestimate it when comparing a free tool against a CNAPP quote. What a commercial platform is actually selling at that point is not the scanner or the detection engine, both of which have credible free equivalents, it is the managed UI, built-in compliance evidence, vendor support, and cross-pillar correlation between runtime and posture that turn raw findings into something an audit or an incident response process can use without a platform team maintaining the glue code. For a small team without dedicated platform engineering headcount, that packaging is usually worth the license. For a team that already runs Kubernetes at scale with platform engineers who would be tuning admission controllers and CI gates either way, self-hosting Trivy and Falco is a legitimate, lower-cost path, provided you honestly account for the engineer-hours as a real cost, not a free one. Our container security tools comparison covers Trivy and Falco directly alongside Wiz and Prisma Cloud if you want the open-source options evaluated on their own terms rather than as the free version of a paid platform.

Which one should you choose?

• You want fast, broad cloud visibility with minimal deployment: Wiz. The agentless graph and attack-path prioritization are why it spread so quickly.
• Your priority is catching and responding to live runtime attacks: Sysdig, whose Falco heritage makes runtime detection its center of gravity.
• You are container and Kubernetes-heavy and want full lifecycle coverage: Aqua.
• You are a large enterprise standardizing on one broad platform, ideally alongside Palo Alto: Prisma Cloud.

Many mature security teams end up running an agentless platform for coverage and a runtime-focused tool for depth, rather than forcing one product to do both jobs equally well.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a CNAPP?

A Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform combines cloud posture management, workload and container protection, cloud entitlements, and runtime detection into one product, replacing several standalone tools.

Wiz vs Prisma Cloud, what is the difference?

Wiz is agentless-first and known for fast setup and attack-path prioritization. Prisma Cloud is a broader, more comprehensive enterprise suite with deeper runtime and code coverage, and correspondingly more complexity.

Which CNAPP is best for runtime security?

Sysdig, built by the creators of the open-source Falco engine, specializes in real-time runtime detection and cloud detection and response.

Is agentless or agent-based CNAPP better?

Agentless (Wiz) gives fast, broad coverage with no rollout, but less continuous runtime depth. Agent-based (Sysdig, Aqua) gives deeper runtime visibility at the cost of deployment. Many teams use both.

Which CNAPP is best for containers and Kubernetes?

Aqua, whose lineage is container security and whose open-source Trivy scanner is widely used, is the most container-lifecycle-focused of the four.

What does it cost in engineering time to run Trivy and Falco yourself instead of buying a CNAPP?

Trivy is low-maintenance since vulnerability scanning is a relatively solved problem, mostly scan scheduling and keeping the database current. Falco is the bigger commitment: running it well across a mid-sized fleet (roughly 50 to 200 nodes) typically takes 20 to 40 engineer-hours a month of steady-state work, rule tuning, SIEM integration, alert triage, and on-call. That engineer-hour cost is real even though it never appears as a license line item, and it is the actual trade-off against a CNAPP subscription.

Related reading

• Top 10 CNAPP solutions: the wider field beyond these four, with the full feature breakdown.
• Alternatives to Wiz: if agentless is your starting point but Wiz is not the right fit.
• AI vulnerability chaining: why attack-path thinking, not isolated findings, is where cloud security is heading.