Akamai mPulse vs Datadog vs Dynatrace comparison

Read 188 Datadog reviews

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15,691 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Read 350 Dynatrace reviews

26,702 Views
19,759 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Akamai mPulse

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Akamai mPulse, Datadog, and Dynatrace based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability.

To learn more, read our detailed Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Report (Updated: August 2025).

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

August 2025

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Helped 867,341 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Akamai mPulse is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 7.2%, down from 10.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 8.8%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Datadog	7.2%
Dynatrace	8.8%
Akamai mPulse	0.5%
Other	83.5%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Arivu Arumugam

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.

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reviewer820579

Senior Product Manager at Redfin Corp

Single pane of glass, easy to share dashboards, and good for monitoring

We've had some issues where we had Datadog automatically turned on in AWS regions that we weren't using, which incurred a small but steady cost that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars spent over a few weeks. I wish there was a global setting that lets an admin restrict which regions DD is turned on in as a default setup step. Sometimes, the APM service dashboard link isn't sharable. I click something in the service catalog, and on that service's APM default view, I try to share a link to that with a teammate, and they reach a blank or error screen. I wish there was more organization and detail in the suggestions when I use the query editor. I'm never quite sure when the autofill dropdown shows up if I'm seeing some custom tag or some default property, so I have to know exactly what I'm looking for in order to build a chart. It's hard to navigate and explore using the query autofill suggestions without knowing exactly what tag to look for. It's been a bit hard to understand how data gets sampled or how many data points a particular dashboard value is using. We've had questions over the RUM metrics that we see and we had to ask for help with how values are calculated, bin sizes, etc to get confidence in our data.

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Anand_Kumar

Enterprise Architect at DXC Technology

Provides a comprehensive view by integrating with other monitoring systems

There may be an issue since there are many tools like Splunk involved in network monitoring. From an IP perspective, Dynatrace is performing well. If they want to develop in network monitoring, they can, as it's part of their product line. It's not rocketry, so they can accomplish it. If I, as an SI, look at it from an enterprise perspective, considering the cost from the client, I prefer not to go with multiple systems, as they don't provide a complete 360-degree view. They need to improve on claims about being an enterprise system. The definition of enterprise is loosely used, however, from a holistic security perspective, including infrastructure, network, ports, software, applications, transactions, and databases, there are areas lacking, especially in network monitoring tools.

Read full review

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 lets us react more quickly to things going wrong. 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 will let us essentially get something back up and running faster for our customers, which is revenue."

"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."

"Watchdog is a favorite feature among a lot of the devs. It catches things they didn't even know were an issue."

"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."

"Thanks to the logs, we manage to make better reports through Jira and also to trace the request with more facility than we would be able to do otherwise."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

"The solution is useful for monitoring logs."

"We integrate our application logs. It is great to be able to tie our metrics and our traces together."

More Datadog pros

"UEM can be used for user impact analysis and troubleshooting."

"We like the alerting feature. For example, my applications are going out on some thresholds. So I get alerts, according to the thresholds I set. I get that data via emails as notifications."

"Most importantly the back-end components. Most of the back-end components that the application connects to; nobody knows how our application interacts with, for example, the DataPower Gateway. But AppMon really provides that information for us. So finding the gaps is the key here."

"What I like about it, is how it auto-discovers everything rapidly; within a matter of seconds you get to see the business transaction and how it's mapped within the product itself."

"We are not blind anymore with our digital services performance; no more fire fighting."

"We had point solutions where we could see different elements of the stack, and Dynatrace ties everything together. Before, we could never get that full-stack monitoring. It also helps us get us the context of the customer experience. What's the business impact of those problems?"

"Dynatrace is a powerful tool for full stack monitoring with APM capabilities and AI root cause problem analysis. This helps our customers with their digital transformation and gaining insight into their infrastructure."

"The most valuable features for me are the dashboard panels because they enable you to monitor multiple applications in one single site."

More Dynatrace pros

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."

"When I started using it years ago, it had stability problems. I remember, specifically, we ran everything in Docker containers. There were some problems getting it into a Docker container with very specific memory limits."

"Deploying the agents is still very manual."

"There is occasional UI slowness and bugs."

"The ability to find what you are looking for when starting out could be improved."

"The pricing should be less of a surprise."

"Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions."

"The pricing model could be simplified as it feels a bit outdated, especially when you look at the billing model of compute instances vs the containers instances."

"I like the idea of monitoring on the go, however, it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box."

More Datadog cons

"Needs a clearer view for Smartscape."

"I would love to see a better data export, because AppMon's charting capabilities leaves a lot to be desired. You have about a 5,000 line limit. I would really like to see the ability to export, in Dynatrace and AppMon, in essentially in a nice format of whatever you want to whatever else."

"Dynatrace needs to improve its configuration."

"AppMon is lacking the AI that can be found in Dynatrace Managed."

"With Dynatrace in our environment, the managed server required root access to run. As a government agency with tight security, this has been an audit concern for us."

"I'd like to see more agents ready to be deployed. I know that it's possible to develop integration with Dynatrace API, but in day-to-day operations it's hard to do that kind of customization. So if they had more agents for more platforms and more applications, I think it would be better."

"Scalability has improved quite a bit from the beginning."

"Improve Dynatrace for the following industries: telco, eCommerce, and banking."

More Dynatrace cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."

"The price is better than some competing products."

"This solution is budget friendly."

"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."

"They prefer monthly subscriptions."

"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."

"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."

"Pricing is somewhat affordable compared to other solutions but in order to really lower the costs of other products you need to plan very carefully your resources usage, otherwise, it can get expensive real quick."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

"As compared to New Relic and other providers, it is more expensive, which is its biggest disadvantage. Its biggest advantage is its capability. It is more feature-rich."

"While it is quite good in respect to its functionality, there are few area in regards to pricing that they can look at how to possibly change. I have heard it's costly."

"We have a three-year contract. We have 30 licenses for the full stack and 3 licenses for the DEM unit."

"The licensing for Dynatrace is high. If you want to go for monitoring solutions, then why Dynatrace? If you have a particular budget, you can go for many other monitoring tools - apart from Dynatrace - and they can help you more and give more data than Dynatrace can. It's not worth the money that you spend for Dynatrace."

"We license it for two environments, typically all of production and all of one lower environment, usually our staging environment. If there is a downside to Dynatrace, the only thing I can think of would be the cost. If it were cheaper, I'd have it in all my environments. I don't think they're charging more than it's worth, by any means. It's just that good software costs money."

"Look at the product and the product features, not the price. Too often people look at the price and turn away. Dynatrace costs a little bit more than the other products I researched, but it can do far more."

"It's expensive."

"The setup costs for Dynatrace are low, however licensing costs are high."

More Dynatrace pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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867,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

15%

Retailer

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	1
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	78
Midsize Enterprise	42
Large Enterprise	82

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	77
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	287

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,...

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 time...

Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was t...

Any advice about APM solutions?

The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if yo...

What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?

While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire sta...

APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit

Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your f...

New Relic vs Akamai mPulse

Comparisons

Compared 18% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Akamai mPulse

Compared 10% of the time

Sentry vs Akamai mPulse

Compared 10% of the time

Grafana vs Akamai mPulse

Compared 10% of the time

More Akamai mPulse Competitors

Azure Monitor vs Datadog

Compared 9% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Datadog

Compared 5% of the time

AWS X-Ray vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

New Relic vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Datadog

Compared 3% of the time

More Datadog Competitors

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Dynatrace

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Dynatrace

Compared 5% of the time

New Relic vs Dynatrace

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Dynatrace

Compared 5% of the time

Elastic Observability vs Dynatrace

Compared 4% of the time

More Dynatrace Competitors

Product Reports

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

August 2025

Download Akamai mPulse product report

Download Datadog product report

September 2025

Download Dynatrace product report

September 2025

Also Known As

SOASTA mPulse

No data available

Overview

Akamai mPulse is a real user monitoring (RUM) solution that gives performance engineers, administrators, and developers the ability to effortlessly visualize website functionality issues and identify ways to improve processes that conventional testing protocols do not find. mPulse gives users usable scenarios to better understand how processes such as user interactions, visual progress, and third-party resources may be disrupting the overall user experience and application delivery.

mPulse enables users to take a deep dive into the specific performance issues and complete comprehensive error analyses, to thoroughly understand the effect on critical user interactions such as conversions, page views, and more.

mPulse gathers and delivers data on an organization's website’s performance and metrics on user web browsing experiences. The mPulse feature “Boomerang” is a JavaScript Library that monitors the website page load time. Boomerang has a unique plugin architecture and works with all websites. The Boomerang feature is embedded on each page of an organization's website.

mPulse works seamlessly with Akamai solution Ion, so the RUM data can be instantly gathered once the Luna Control Center has been activated. Ion instantly attaches Boomerang to the organization’s web properties; there is no need to change the website code.

Akamai mPulse Benefits

Third-party monitoring: mPulse enables users to effortlessly monitor and visualize the effect that third-party vendors, resources, and scripts may have on the organization’s web properties.
Real-time intuitions: RUM data is continually being gathered, so users are able to instantly experience changes in user performance during every critical event. Users are able to respond immediately and make corrections or amendments as needed. Additionally, mPulse integrates effectively with other third-party notification solutions, such as Slack, PagerDuty, and webhook API support.
Framework integrations: mPulse integrates with many of today’s popular single-page application (SPA) frameworks, such as React.js, Backbone.js, Angular.js, Ember.js, and even some custom frameworks. mPulse has the ability to also be seamlessly integrated in Non-SPA websites.
Intuitive feedback: mPulse gathers data and creates workable solutions so users have a better understanding of how objects, images, or even entire pages are affecting user behavior. Users can gather numerous metrics (custom or advanced) to achieve a better, more complete understanding of ways to improve the user experience with the application or website.
Custom metrics and timers: With mPulse, users can effortlessly create custom timers to discover important performance sessions unique to the application. The mPulse dashboard allows users to set up trackers for numerous metrics, such as:
- First image load time
- Sidebar load time
- Page load times
- Third-party resource content load time
mPulse Beacon API: This valuable benefit allows users to send custom metrics from mobile and web applications to mPulse. This gives mPulse greater flexibility and usability to frameworks and platforms that can make HTTP calls. Representational State Transfer (REST) interface is included and is able to be used by any web application using any language running on the platform. There is also a Beacon API library for JavaScript. This option is available from the dashboard by creating a new application and an API key.

Akamai

Datadog is a comprehensive cloud monitoring platform designed to track performance, availability, and log aggregation for cloud resources like AWS, ECS, and Kubernetes. It offers robust tools for creating dashboards, observing user behavior, alerting, telemetry, security monitoring, and synthetic testing.

Datadog supports full observability across cloud providers and environments, enabling troubleshooting, error detection, and performance analysis to maintain system reliability. It offers detailed visualization of servers, integrates seamlessly with cloud providers like AWS, and provides powerful out-of-the-box dashboards and log analytics. Despite its strengths, users often note the need for better integration with other solutions and improved application-level insights. Common challenges include a complex pricing model, setup difficulties, and navigation issues. Users frequently mention the need for clearer documentation, faster loading times, enhanced error traceability, and better log management.

What are the key features of Datadog?

Graphs and Dashboards: Visualizes servers and infrastructure with customizable views.
Metrics: Offers deep insights into system performance and user behavior.
Log Management: Provides powerful analytics for logs and seamless log aggregation.
Unified Tagging: Facilitates organization and retrieval of metrics and logs.
APM and RUM: Enables application performance monitoring and real user monitoring for comprehensive insights.
Synthetic Testing: Allows the simulation of user interactions to test application performance.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

System Reliability: Helps ensure uptime and performance across cloud environments.
Proactive Issue Resolution: Assists in identifying and resolving issues before they impact users.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines monitoring and log management tasks.
Flexible Integrations: Adapts to various cloud services and infrastructure setups.
Real-Time Alerts: Provides timely notifications to address problems swiftly.

Datadog is implemented across different industries, from tech companies monitoring cloud applications to finance sectors ensuring transactional systems' performance. E-commerce platforms use Datadog to track and visualize user behavior and system health, while healthcare organizations utilize it for maintaining secure, compliant environments. Every implementation assists teams in customizing monitoring solutions specific to their industry's requirements.

Dynatrace is an AI-powered software intelligence monitoring platform that accelerates digital transformation and simplifies cloud complexities. Dynatrace is an entirely automated full-stack solution that provides data and answers about the performance of your applications and deep insight into every transaction throughout every application, including the end-user experience. By modernizing and automating enterprise cloud operations, users can deliver an optimal digital experience with higher quality software to customers faster.

Dynatrace offers an all-in-one automated artificial intelligence solution that brings together application performance, cloud and infrastructure, and digital experience monitoring. Dynatrace accelerates performance-driven results through operations, development, and business teams with a shared metrics platform. In addition, users are provided a full-stack monitoring experience with three patented technologies:

Smartscape - visualization mechanism that maps the totality of everything working in your environment and detects any casual dependencies between your applications, processes, websites, services, hosts, cloud infrastructure, and networks.
OneAgent - a technology that analyzes, gathers ,and unifies all business performance metrics throughout every layer of your technology stack.
PurePath Technology - code-level context and timings are captured from the mainframe to the cloud for all end-to-end transactions.

What does Dynatrace offer?

Dynatrace redefines how organizations monitor their digital ecosystems. The solution offers:

Cloud Automation: With AI engine Davis®, users can see the exact reason for problems and facilitate quick auto-remediation and intelligent cloud orchestration.
Application Security: With automated application vulnerability management, users can deliver applications faster and more securely.
Infrastructure Monitoring: Convenient broad visibility across your environments is provided with streamlined, automated infrastructure monitoring.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): Optimize your applications, provide better support, and improve user experience with a combination of Real User Monitoring (RUM), Session Replay, and synthetic monitoring throughout your environment.
Applications and Microservices: For complex cloud environments, Dynatrace can automatically provide visibility and root-cause answers. It can also monitor microservices.
Digital Business Analytics: Get AI-powered, real-time answers to analytical business queries with KPIs and metrics that are already flowing through applications.

Reviews from Real Users

Dynatrace is the only solution that provides answers to organizations based on deep insight into each user, transaction, and organization's environment.

Barry P., a managing performance engineer at Medica Health Plans, writes, "With Dynatrace, we have synthetic checks and real-user monitoring of all of our websites, places where members and providers can interact with us over the web. We monitor the response times of those with Dynatrace, and it's all integrated into one place."

A consultant at a tech service company notes, "A feature that's one of the highlights of Dynatrace is the AI. The second most valuable feature is OneAgent. Between infrastructures, applications, operating systems, you can deploy with just a single agent and can practically install and forget about it."

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

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express