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Akamai mPulse vs Datadog comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

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
67th
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (9th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (3rd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (2nd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Akamai mPulse is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 4.1%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog4.1%
Akamai mPulse0.6%
Other95.3%
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.
Kallamuddin Ansari - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Consultant at HR Software Solution
Unified monitoring has improved incident response and now reduces root cause analysis time
One area where Datadog can be improved is around alert quality. In the beginning, it tends to generate many alerts, and without proper tuning, many of them are not actionable. It would help if there were more built-in guidance or smarter defaults to reduce noise. Another improvement area is cost visibility and control. As log and metric ingestion increases, it has not always been straightforward to track which data is driving the cost. More granular and real-time cost insights would make it easier to manage. Additionally, while the dashboards are flexible, navigating and organizing them at scale can become slightly difficult. Better structuring or management options would help in larger environments.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Enables dynamic injections from within the product which is great."
"The most valuable feature is the solutions overall performance. It is very efficient and accurate for our usage."
"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."
"It provides a great overview for management regarding user experience."
"It provides real-time monitoring for performance and availability of specific portions of the website without a significant data overhead."
"There's a good relationship between the price and the licences."
"It’s a very good product for performance tracking, I haven’t used many others, so I can’t comment on a competitive level."
"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."
"Datadog has a lot of features to be able to drill down deep into the swath of logs that our platforms generate."
"It provides more cloud data. They tend to just get the way a service would be designed on the cloud."
"Datadog's log aggregation is really helpful since it lets me and every other engineer on my team login, view, and share logs when we need to debug our application."
"We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack."
"Datadog has alerting events and metrics all in one place; this was a huge plus, other solutions were trying to treat monitoring as a multi-faceted problem, while Datadog treated it as one problem."
"Real user monitoring has made triaging any possible bugs our users might face a lot easier."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution include log search to help triage specific problems that we get notified about (whether by alerts we have configured or users that have contacted us)."
"Knowing the entry point helps us choose which part of the program should be improved next, and it also helps us with collecting important data about the overall usage of each module within our application."
 

Cons

"Scalability to larger volume of data seems to be hit or miss."
"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."
"They work very well, only thing is they need more time to improve and fix all the issues."
"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."
"As a new customer, the Datadog user interface is a bit daunting."
"Could be a little more user friendly."
"For specialized support, it feels like you're under-staffed, having to wait days/weeks for a solution is a big NO-NO."
"One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report."
"One thing we have run into is that it is so easy to add monitoring that we turn on things without really understanding the costs."
"I find the setup cost to be too expensive. The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100. I am evaluating the usage of this solution, however, it is too expensive."
"The application performance monitoring module had very few functionalities that we needed for the application health check."
"One thing to improve would be making it easier to see common patterns across traces."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."
"The tool is open-source."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise100
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Any advice about APM solutions?
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 monitor...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SOASTA mPulse
No data available
 

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
Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai mPulse vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,939 professionals have used our research since 2012.