Cloud Security AI Compared: Wiz vs Orca Security vs Prisma Cloud

Every cloud security posture management (CSPM) vendor now claims AI-powered risk detection. Wiz, Orca Security, and Palo Alto Prisma Cloud all promise to find the misconfigurations, exposed secrets, and lateral movement paths that matter before attackers do. From a pentester’s perspective, the question isn’t whether these platforms find issues. They all do. The question is which one finds the issues that would actually let me move through your environment, and which ones bury real findings under a pile of medium-severity noise.

This guide compares Wiz, Orca Security, and Prisma Cloud across the dimensions that matter most when you’re defending multi-cloud infrastructure: scanning architecture, AI-driven prioritization, attack path analysis, multi-cloud coverage, pricing, and how painful each one is to deploy.

Quick Comparison

Agentless vs Agent-Based Scanning

This architectural difference drives almost every operational trade-off between these platforms.

Wiz: Snapshot-Based Agentless

Wiz connects to your cloud provider APIs and reads disk snapshots, network configuration, IAM policies, and container images without deploying anything into your workloads. The scanner builds a graph model of your environment from these snapshots. From a pentesting standpoint, this means Wiz sees your infrastructure as an outsider with read access to your cloud control plane. It catches misconfigurations, exposed storage buckets, overprivileged IAM roles, vulnerable packages in container images, and secrets embedded in disk snapshots.

What it misses: runtime behavior. Wiz can tell you that a container image has a vulnerable version of OpenSSL. It cannot tell you whether that container is actively being exploited, whether a process is making suspicious outbound connections, or whether someone is running cryptomining inside your Kubernetes pods right now. Snapshot-based scanning has inherent latency; changes between scan intervals are invisible.

Orca Security: SideScanning

Orca’s SideScanning technology is conceptually similar to Wiz’s approach but predates it. Orca reads block storage snapshots and cloud APIs to build an asset inventory and detect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, malware, and lateral movement risks. Like Wiz, zero agents deployed.

Orca’s differentiator is the “SideScanning” branding around how it accesses block-level data, including the ability to detect malware by analyzing file signatures from snapshots without running an antivirus agent on the workload. In practice, the coverage is comparable to Wiz for static analysis. The same runtime visibility gap applies.

Prisma Cloud: Agent-First with Agentless Fallback

Prisma Cloud takes the opposite approach. The core platform deploys the Prisma Agent (formerly Twistlock Defender) into your workloads for runtime protection, vulnerability scanning, compliance enforcement, and WAAS (Web Application and API Security). Palo Alto has added agentless scanning options for organizations that can’t or won’t deploy agents everywhere, but the full feature set requires agent coverage.

From a pentester’s perspective, Prisma Cloud’s agent architecture means it can catch things the agentless platforms cannot: runtime process execution, network connections from within containers, file integrity monitoring, and real-time exploit detection. If I’m running a reverse shell from a compromised container, Prisma’s agent sees it. Wiz and Orca do not.

The trade-off is real: agents require deployment, maintenance, and compute overhead. In large Kubernetes environments with thousands of pods, managing the Prisma Agent at scale is a nontrivial operational burden.

AI Risk Prioritization

All three platforms produce hundreds or thousands of findings in a typical enterprise environment. AI-driven prioritization determines whether your team spends time on the findings that matter.

Wiz

Wiz’s Security Graph is its strongest feature. The graph models relationships between cloud resources, network exposure, identities, vulnerabilities, and data stores. When Wiz scores a finding, it considers the full context: Is this vulnerable VM internet-facing? Does it have a role that can access sensitive data? Is the vulnerable package actually loaded in memory (based on snapshot analysis)? This context-aware scoring means a critical CVE on an internal, isolated workload with no sensitive data access gets scored lower than a medium CVE on an internet-facing instance with S3 read permissions.

In pentesting terms, Wiz’s graph thinks like an attacker planning lateral movement. It identifies the combinations of weaknesses that create exploitable paths, not just individual findings in isolation.

Orca Security

Orca’s AI prioritization follows a similar context-based approach. The platform scores risks based on asset importance (which Orca calls “Crown Jewels”), network exposure, exploitability, and blast radius. You tag your critical assets, and Orca’s scoring model weights findings that threaten those assets higher than findings on disposable workloads.

The Crown Jewel concept is useful operationally. Instead of asking “what’s the most critical vulnerability,” Orca answers “what’s the most critical risk to the assets you told us matter.” This reduces noise from high-severity CVEs on workloads that don’t touch production data.

Prisma Cloud

Prisma Cloud’s Unified Risk Score aggregates findings across its modules (CSPM, CWP, CIEM, DSPM) into a single risk score per asset. The ML model weighs vulnerability severity, network exposure, IAM permissions, data sensitivity, and runtime signals (if agents are deployed). The runtime signal integration gives Prisma an edge in prioritization accuracy: it can deprioritize a critical CVE if the agent confirms the vulnerable process isn’t running, or escalate a medium finding if it detects active exploitation attempts.

Who wins on prioritization: Wiz’s graph-based approach is the most intuitive for security teams thinking in attack paths. Prisma Cloud’s runtime signals add accuracy that agentless platforms cannot match. Orca’s Crown Jewel model is the most operationally practical for teams that have clearly defined critical assets.

Attack Path Analysis

This is where CSPM tools prove their value to pentesters and red teamers.

Wiz produces visual attack path maps that show how an attacker could chain weaknesses: internet-facing VM with a known RCE, lateral movement via overprivileged service account, data exfiltration from an unencrypted database. The visualization is the best of the three for presenting findings to non-technical stakeholders.

Orca offers attack path analysis tied to its Crown Jewel assets. The paths show how an adversary could reach your designated critical resources from an initial access point. The paths are accurate but the visualization is less polished than Wiz’s graph view.

Prisma Cloud provides attack path policies that identify chained risks, but the implementation feels bolted on compared to Wiz’s graph-native design. Prisma’s strength is correlating attack paths with runtime data, showing not just theoretical paths but which paths have active indicators of compromise.

Multi-Cloud Support

All three platforms support AWS, Azure, and GCP. The differences are in depth and breadth of coverage for each provider.

Wiz added Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Alibaba Cloud support, giving it five-cloud coverage. AWS and Azure are the strongest; GCP coverage is mature. OCI and Alibaba support cover core services but lag behind the big three in depth.

Orca covers AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba Cloud. No OCI support. Coverage depth across the big three is comparable to Wiz, with strong Kubernetes and container registry scanning across all supported clouds.

Prisma Cloud supports AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, and Alibaba Cloud. As one of the earliest CSPM platforms, its multi-cloud policy library is the largest of the three, with over 1,500 pre-built policies. The trade-off: the policy library can feel overwhelming, and many policies generate findings that are technically accurate but operationally irrelevant.

Who wins on multi-cloud: Prisma Cloud for breadth of policies. Wiz for balanced depth across five providers. Orca for teams that don’t need OCI.

Pricing Models

None of these vendors publish pricing. All require sales engagement. Based on publicly available data from analyst reports and practitioner discussions:

Wiz prices per cloud workload (VMs, containers, serverless functions). For a 1,000-workload environment, expect $150,000 to $350,000 annually depending on modules selected. Wiz bundles CSPM, vulnerability management, CIEM, and DSPM into its platform; adding modules increases the per-workload rate. Multi-year commitments reduce the unit price significantly.

Orca prices per asset, with tiered pricing based on total asset count. Comparable environments run $120,000 to $300,000 annually. Orca’s pricing tends to be slightly lower than Wiz for equivalent coverage, though the gap has narrowed as both platforms have expanded their feature sets.

Prisma Cloud uses a credit-based model. You purchase a pool of credits, and different modules consume credits at different rates. CWP (workload protection) consumes more credits per workload than CSPM alone. This model gives flexibility to shift coverage between modules but makes cost prediction harder. A 1,000-workload environment with CSPM plus CWP typically runs $200,000 to $400,000 annually. The agent-based architecture means you’re also absorbing compute overhead costs on your workloads.

Deployment Complexity

Wiz deploys in hours. You grant read-only API access to your cloud accounts, Wiz scans your environment, and findings start appearing within 24 hours. No agents, no infrastructure, no network changes. This is the fastest time-to-value of any enterprise security tool category.

Orca follows the same pattern. API-only integration, no agent deployment, initial results within hours. The onboarding experience is comparable to Wiz.

Prisma Cloud is a different story. The agentless CSPM scanning deploys quickly (similar to Wiz and Orca), but full workload protection requires deploying Prisma Agents across your compute fleet. In Kubernetes environments, this means DaemonSets on every node. In VM environments, it means agent installation on every instance. For a 1,000-workload environment, expect 2 to 4 weeks for full agent deployment with testing. Auto-scaling environments need automation to ensure new instances get agents. Serverless protection requires wrapper functions.

Who wins on deployment: Wiz and Orca are tied for speed and simplicity. Prisma Cloud’s agent requirement adds weeks to deployment but unlocks runtime protection that the agentless platforms cannot provide.

The Verdict

Choose Wiz if you want the best attack path visualization, the fastest deployment, and your primary concern is finding and prioritizing cloud misconfigurations and vulnerability chains before attackers exploit them. Wiz’s Security Graph is the strongest tool for understanding how an attacker would traverse your environment. Accept the runtime visibility gap or supplement with a dedicated cloud workload protection tool.

Choose Orca Security if you want agentless coverage at a slightly lower price point, your critical assets are well defined, and you value the Crown Jewel prioritization model. Orca’s SideScanning predates Wiz and the detection capabilities are comparable. It’s a strong choice for organizations that know exactly what they’re protecting and want findings ranked accordingly.

Choose Prisma Cloud if runtime protection is non-negotiable, you need agent-based workload security alongside CSPM, and your team can handle the operational overhead of agent deployment at scale. Prisma’s runtime visibility catches post-exploitation activity that Wiz and Orca cannot see. If your threat model includes adversaries who have already breached the perimeter, Prisma’s agent architecture closes a real gap.

For teams running a pentest or red team engagement against their own cloud infrastructure, Wiz’s attack path graph is the most useful defensive tool to validate against your findings. For blue teams operating a SOC that needs runtime alerting on active threats, Prisma Cloud’s agent-based monitoring provides signals that snapshot-based platforms cannot deliver. Orca sits in the middle as a capable, cost-effective option that covers the CSPM fundamentals without overcomplicating the stack.

Pick based on your threat model, not the vendor pitch deck.