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Akamai mPulse vs Apica comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Akamai mPulse
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
55th
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Apica
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
19th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (17th), IT Operations Analytics (7th), Observability Pipeline Software (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Akamai mPulse is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apica is 0.7%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Apica0.7%
Akamai mPulse0.6%
Other98.7%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Arivu Arumugam - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Lacking in regard to observation of the entire platform but does dynamic injections from within
There is little that's unique about mPulse but since the solution is part of Akamai, you can do dynamic injections from within the product which is a great feature. the UI is quite good. It offers a basic set of features but nothing unique other than that as part of Akamai, you can do dynamic injections.
Noorul Mustafa Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Associate Vice President at Wells Fargo
Validates content and perform login functionalities on front-end applications
First of all, it will depend on the type of application. If it's a web application, I would recommend implementing it in your lower environment first and checking for functionality. If you are satisfied, then push it to the higher environments. Apica has detected server-related issues and various web application-related issues promptly, alerting us in a timely manner. This allowed us to implement automation within our processes, ensuring comprehensive performance monitoring from failure detection to recovery. It was pretty easy to learn. I attended a couple of sessions with team members. They provided knowledge transfer, which took about a week. After that, I was able to onboard the company. However, for minor issues, I would still contact them. If you're a quick learner, it could take just a couple of weeks to get the hang of it. You can integrate Apica architect into your system because they provide APIs. With these APIs, you can utilize Apica where and when it's needed. For instance, you can create your own microservices to automate tasks or integrate it with tools like Postman. This flexibility allows you to embed Apica into various automation processes or any other functionalities you require. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"There is little that's unique about mPulse but since the solution is part of Akamai, you can do dynamic injections from within the product which is a great feature."
"It’s a very good product for performance tracking, I haven’t used many others, so I can’t comment on a competitive level."
"We are a worldwide company and we need to have a solution with good performance which the solution is providing us with; it has helped our company."
"There's a good relationship between the price and the licences."
"It provides real-time monitoring for performance and availability of specific portions of the website without a significant data overhead."
"The most valuable feature is the solutions overall performance. It is very efficient and accurate for our usage."
"Enables dynamic injections from within the product which is great."
"It provides a great overview for management regarding user experience."
"As always, within the IT industry, everybody's always looking to upgrade and update everything else like that, Apica has been one of those things but it's really hard to replace because it offers us the unique capability to see what the customer is seeing."
"It uses a basic scripting language, which is easy to learn and customize as needed. Compared to LoadRunner, I found writing and customizing code much easier in Apica."
"The product team behind it is very committed to making those changes and the customer happy."
"The solution captures all our requests and responses."
"Our application SREs do script checks in such a way that closely mimic our customers' actions using the platform. Because there are so many different ways and options to be able to configure checks to closely mirror your applications' capabilities, it provides a lot of optionality for teams to create the right type of check that can notify when there are any issues. At the end of the day, we want our monitoring tools to be able to catch any outage before our customers do. This is where Apica Synthetic does a great job."
"We see the benefit almost every day, as it allows us to be alerted whenever there is a store that is not responding properly around the world, so our network operation center can immediately check and find the root cause."
"One of the biggest advantages of moving to Apica is the ability get to a hybrid model with the architecture in the cloud and our agents on-prem. We also have access to Apica's cloud agent across the globe. That has changed the way that we have our load testing setup at this point. Previously, it was always internal. Now, with this change in the way it is implemented for load testing, we can test anywhere across the globe and from the list of agents available within Apica's cloud. If I don't have an agent available in a second location, it just takes an email to their customer support, then it is spun up within 24 hours. That flexibility has changed the way that we perceive our load tests, not just in the US, but globally."
"It saves a lot of time by capturing and pinpointing the exact problem that is happening quickly."
 

Cons

"They work very well, only thing is they need more time to improve and fix all the issues."
"The end-to-end distributor tracing connectivity isn't there."
"In the next release, I would like to see the possibility of sharing the metric from this solution with other solutions."
"Scalability to larger volume of data seems to be hit or miss."
"The solution didn't help us much and that's the reason we never used mPulse on a full scale and why we chose to go with Dynatrace."
"It needs a more intuitive GUI and more customization options."
"We could use more detailed information in the request and response sections."
"The accuracy of alerts can be improved a little bit; what we have seen happen is the number of alerts that we are getting is very frequent, and we would like to tone down the number of alerts."
"We have been focused on reducing polling times for synthetic checks. We have gone from 10 minutes down to five minutes for a pretty broad swath, but there is some appetite to reduce that further, which could be an improvement."
"Alerting needs improvement. It's a little noisy."
"Sometimes there's an outage, but it's not frequent."
"The initial screen on their dashboard could have a bit more data, but this is a small thing."
"Having to install an application on your desktop to utilize something like ZebraTester is a little cumbersome."
"Apica is costly, and there's no way to test mobile applications through Apica."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Apica is pretty cost-effective if you buy both solutions together: Synthetic and LoadTest. If you are going for one solution, the cost is on par with any tool in the market."
"License management is another area that Apica could do better. We have already had these conversations with our account teams. This is something that they are looking at largely improving in upcoming releases. I believe that this is already on their roadmap."
"I am sure that Apica's price will be lower than LoadRunner."
"The tool is completely free and open source. I've been using it for about two and a half years and installed it on both my personal and client machines without needing a license. All features are available for use without any hidden fees."
"The product is less expensive compared to LoadRunner."
"Another main difference between Apica and the other products was the cost. We really thought that the balance in Apica between the features and costs was the best among all the products on which we did a PoC."
"The pricing and licensing are very reasonable. At the end of the day, you are using their technology/software and getting X amount of checks for a very decent value. As for discounts, they try to meet your budgets as much as they can. For example, if you need 100 checks and you have X amount of budget for it, then they will try and get down to that price. Costing-wise, it is a reasonably cost product. They will always try and come down to your price if you need them to come down to it by knocking off certain areas."
"The pricing is fair. It is neither too cheap nor too expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Construction Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise17
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about Apica Synthetic?
The GUI is powerful and doesn't require scripting or regular expressions. It has a vast finder for correlation, which is easier than other tools like JMeter and LoadRunner. It's also easy to integr...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apica Synthetic?
I know Apica is an expensive solution, but it is worth the money for the service it provides.
What needs improvement with Apica Synthetic?
Apica cannot perform endurance or scale-up tests independently. It requires other tools like ALM. When editing scripts, only one can be accessed at a time, risking changes affecting other folders. ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SOASTA mPulse
Apica LoadTest, Apica Synthetic
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nordstrom, Gatwick, DirecTV, MSN, SquareSpace, SAP, Lenovo, Hallmark, myspace, Intuit, Kentucky Derby, Toys "R" Us, Netflix, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Lowe's, Nike, REI, Apple, Sears, Verizon, Wendy's, Huawei
HBO, JPMC, Morgan Stanley, Xander, EA Sports, Volvo
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai mPulse vs. Apica and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.