Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Akamai mPulse vs Datadog comparison

 

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
55th
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
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
209
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (4th), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 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 Datadog is 5.2%, down from 9.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog5.2%
Akamai mPulse0.6%
Other94.2%
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.
Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger
Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling
Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.

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."
"It provides real-time monitoring for performance and availability of specific portions of the website without a significant data overhead."
"It’s a very good product for performance tracking, I haven’t used many others, so I can’t comment on a competitive level."
"It provides a great overview for management regarding user experience."
"There's a good relationship between the price and the licences."
"The ease of graph building is nice, and MUCH easier than Prometheus."
"It lets us react more quickly to things going wrong, so whereas before it might have been 30 minutes to an hour before we noticed something going on, we will know within a minute or two if something is off, which lets us get something back up and running faster for our customers, which is revenue."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities are really valuable. You can just log on and see everything that is happening within an IT environment."
"Datadog is providing efficiency in the products we develop for the wireless device engineering department."
"Watchdog is a favorite feature among a lot of the devs. It catches things they didn't even know were an issue."
"The infrastructure monitoring capabilities, especially for our Kubernetes clusters, have helped us optimize resource allocation and reduce costs."
"The performance of Datadog is good."
"We also use APM and metrics to view the status of our Pub/Sub topics and queues, especially when dealing with undelivered messages."
 

Cons

"The end-to-end distributor tracing connectivity isn't there."
"It needs a more intuitive GUI and more customization options."
"Scalability to larger volume of data seems to be hit or miss."
"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."
"One thing to improve would be making it easier to see common patterns across traces."
"At the beginning, when we started throwing logs at it, there was a bit of hiccup. However, this was during their beta period, so hiccups were expected."
"It is far too easy to run up huge unexpected costs."
"As a new customer, the Datadog user interface is a bit daunting."
"The on-premise version is very difficult to upgrade."
"It's not that straightforward when creating an alert. The syntax is a little confusing."
"Datadog could be improved if the menu system was a little clearer and less cluttered, making it easier to navigate."
"The solution needs to integrate AI tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"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."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."
"Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare 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 Business81
Midsize Enterprise46
Large Enterprise99
 

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: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.