No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Akamai mPulse vs Datadog comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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
62nd
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
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (1st), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th), AI Observability (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 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 7.6% 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.
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

"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the solutions overall performance. It is very efficient and accurate for our usage."
"It provides a great overview for management regarding user experience."
"Enables dynamic injections from within the product which is great."
"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."
"Datadog has positively impacted my organization by helping us make our web portals more efficient, and as we get the agent installed on more devices, it's really provided us visibility that we haven't had in my entire career with Ace Hardware."
"When an alert fires, our on-call engineer can see the infrastructure metric spike (like CPU), pivot directly to the application traces (APM) running on that host, and see the exact, correlated logs from the services causing the problem—all in one place."
"The Datadog suite has allowed us to easily integrate log collection into all of our services and quickly detect unexpected changes in system data to declare security incidents."
"Their interface is probably one of the easiest things to use because it lets non-developers and non-engineers quickly get access to metrics and pull business value out of them. We could put together dashboards and give it to people who are non-technical, then they can see the state of the world."
"With Datadog I can look at the health of the technology stack and services."
"Log management is a great way for me to identify changes in behavior across services and environments as we make changes or as user behavior evolves."
"It has democratized our logs and metrics, allowing all engineers to have insight into how our apps perform."
"The dashboards are great."
 

Cons

"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."
"It needs a more intuitive GUI and more customization options."
"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."
"The product could be improved by providing remote control to agents, enabling them to execute automation and collections without requiring another automation tool or integration."
"I'd like to see more flexibility in the customization and they have a few settings which need to be changed but we are unable to make those changes as users or as the administrator."
"The Log Explorer could be better. I don't think it has log manipulation as Splunk does."
"Our main challenge is implementing the solutions in our Kubernetes cluster, separated just as logs to the specific namespace since the volume of logs is tremendous."
"One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report."
"The user interface is okay, but sometimes cost is the issue because for logging, I had to actually trim down my logs because the cost is too much."
"In production, we intend to use trace IDs generated by RUM to attach to support tickets when a user experiences a traceable network error, and we want to display this trace ID to the user so if they were to contact us about a specific issue, they can provide us an exact ID displayed to them back to us. Currently, this is not possible out-of-the-box client-side without inventing our own solution for capturing these trace IDs, such as shimming the native fetch or returning the ID from the service response."
"Datadog is a platform that can be improved by making its pricing more predictable, as sometimes it is difficult to forecast exactly how much a new project will cost until after we have started ingesting the data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"It has a module-based pricing model."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"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."
"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."
"Sometimes it's very hard to project how much it will cost for the monthly subscription for the next month when you add certain features. Having better visibility of the cost would give a better experience."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
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: September 2026.
913,924 professionals have used our research since 2012.