Akamai mPulse vs Dynatrace comparison

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Akamai mPulse

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Dynatrace and Akamai mPulse are both performance monitoring solutions. Users report a preference for the extensive capabilities of Dynatrace, while Akamai mPulse is noted for its robust real-user monitoring features.

What features are offered by Dynatrace in comparison to Akamai mPulse?

Dynatrace users appreciate its AI-driven problem detection, automated root cause analysis, and proactive system management. Akamai mPulse is valued for its real-time user monitoring, deep analysis of user experience, and live performance tracking.

What areas of improvement can be found in Dynatrace in comparison to Akamai mPulse?

For Dynatrace, areas needing improvement include cost management, configuration settings, and the need for enhanced user-friendly configuration. Akamai mPulse users seek better data visualization, integration with third-party tools, and improved integration capabilities.

How is the ease of deployment and customer service of Dynatrace in comparison to Akamai mPulse?

Dynatrace is straightforward to deploy due to its automated setup and comprehensive support. Akamai mPulse is more complex in its deployment process but receives high marks for responsive and knowledgeable customer service.

What setup costs and ROI can be seen with Dynatrace in comparison to Akamai mPulse?

Dynatrace users report higher setup costs but justify this with strong ROI due to its extensive feature set and automation. Akamai mPulse users find it more affordable initially but note that the ROI depends heavily on the specific use case.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai mPulse vs. Dynatrace Report (Updated: September 2026).

Akamai mPulse vs. Dynatrace

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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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Dynatrace

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

2nd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

360

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (6th), Mobile APM (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (3rd)

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 Dynatrace is 4.8%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Dynatrace	4.8%
Akamai mPulse	0.6%
Other	94.6%

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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Manish Indupuri

senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

AI-driven insights have reduced downtime and improved cross-team collaboration

We encountered some challenges while using Dynatrace. Although the initial setup was smooth, fine-tuning alert thresholds and custom metrics took some time. Another challenge was that Dynatrace charges based on host units, so we had to carefully plan our agent deployments. The licensing model is expensive. Additionally, the complexity of setup is an issue. While OneAgent and auto-discover services are powerful, the setup is more complex compared to other tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. These integrations are simple and basic, but Dynatrace setup requires more complexity based on the environment. For new users wanting to use Dynatrace, it is difficult. However, the AI-related solutions and metrics took us to the next level for identifying and fixing things. Dynatrace requires an agent for operation. OneAgent is powerful, but it is also resource-heavy. On lightweight nodes or older systems, the agent can slightly impact performance. If Dynatrace could implement a lightweight agent behavior, we could make things faster. Additionally, if Dynatrace could add a long-term retention policy so that we could store more data and find fine-grained details, that would help us. While Dynatrace managed edition supports on-premises deployment, the SaaS version depends on cloud connectivity. For highly regulated or air-gapped environments, setup and updates can be challenging. Although the initial setup is smooth, if someone wants to fine-tune it and fully understand the tool end-to-end, it could be tricky.

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

"There's a good relationship between the price and the licences."

"It provides a great overview for management regarding user experience."

"The most valuable feature is the solutions overall performance. It is very efficient and accurate for our usage."

"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."

"Enables dynamic injections from within the product which is great."

"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 real-time monitoring for performance and availability of specific portions of the website without a significant data overhead."

"Auto alerting and reporting on the application and the infrastructure aid us in delivering our service with greater value."

"The main thing we have achieved using this software is minimizing the downtime of our applications by reacting to the alerts that it triggers."

"Improves the ability to isolate issues and determine root cause with the same tool."

"I like the drill-down feature, that it can drill down to the code level to point to where the problems are. It's also helpful for the developers to identify what exactly happens, rather than the operation team having to do so. It works well for the developers to fix issues."

"Dynatrace gives us and our clients information about all layers and components of their platform, including the most important starting point for us: real-time and historical end user experience."

"With the latest version, the AI engine highlights the root causes automatically."

"We are able to see globally our end user response time tracing down to the user ID."

"It eases the investigation process (faster feedback loop with clients), better pro-activity on possible outages (in order to avoid outages), and eases the process of fine tuning allocation of resources to processes."

More Dynatrace pros

Cons

"The end-to-end distributor tracing connectivity isn't there."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Right now, the whole analysis part that we are doing is manually. Therefore, if we can implement the analysis part in an AI, it would definitely help to find the root cause quickly and retrieve customers' problem within minutes."

"We have a couple of one page apps that it has a problem with because it doesn't call to the server all the time. I believe part of that is taken care of in the next version."

"It needs improvement with proprietary protocols for the DC RUM part."

"The one area that we get value out of now, where we would love to see additional features, is the Session Replay."

"I would like to see AppMon also integrated in the Dynatrace portal. There are certain features, which I am not saying are not there in Dynatrace, but I am used to in AppMon."

"I need more experience, because I have not used the tool."

"I did like the old dashboards, the legacy 6.3 for example; the way we were able to do the dashboarding in the client. I would like to be able to see that in the new version of Dynatrace."

"I have run into AppMon causing issues. There have been a lot times when I have waited for a release, AppMon does the release, then it ends up taking down our application."

More Dynatrace cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"The limitations I see are more to do - and maybe it's because of the nature of the job I have - but they have to do with pricing. It's a little bit pricey. It's a very good tool. It's worth the price, to a certain degree. But it's hard to justify when it's that costly."

"There is a license issue where if we increase the memory we have to up the licenses. I was unaware of that going in. I thought it was scalable without all the paperwork behind the scenes. "

"Its license is a bit expensive. We renew it yearly."

"Pricing is based on the number of servers monitored, so for big applications, it is a bit expensive."

"The product is definitely worth taking a look at. Be aware that it is probably more pricey than other options on the market, but there are a lot of capabilities. Dynatrace has an eye toward the future and the computing and monitoring needs that we are gonna need for the cloud. "

"I think the pricing is at a fair value for what it is."

"If there are no corporate requirements to run Dynatrace Managed (operating it yourself), I would definitely go for the size option. For small and medium-sized companies, the size option is probably the cheapest one. You don't need to look into operating it. You don't need to run hardware. It is pay as you go."

"Dynatrace is still kind of an expensive solution compared to others. But I recognize that they are ahead of the competition when we do a feature by feature comparison."

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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914,394 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Construction Company

10%

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Outsourcing Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

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	80
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	300

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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 you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...

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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 stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...

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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...

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Avantra vs Dynatrace

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Download Akamai mPulse product report

Download Dynatrace product report

Also Known As

SOASTA mPulse

No data available

Overview

Akamai mPulse delivers real-time data on web performance, helping businesses optimize user experience to drive engagement.

Designed for performance analytics, Akamai mPulse offers in-depth insights into user interactions with digital assets. By monitoring real-time performance metrics across devices, it delivers actionable data that supports enhanced decision-making processes, enabling improved site efficiency.

What are the key features of Akamai mPulse?

Real-Time Monitoring: Provides instant performance insights to address issues promptly.
User Journeys: Tracks detailed user interactions, offering a comprehensive view on user behavior.
Customizable Dashboards: Lets users tailor data displays for specific needs and focus areas.
Anomaly Detection: Identifies and alerts deviations in normal performance metrics.
Advanced Analytics: Delivers data-driven insights for strategic planning and optimization.

How does Akamai mPulse improve ROI?

Reduced Downtime: By promptly identifying and resolving performance issues, availability remains high.
Enhanced User Satisfaction: Optimized load times and performance boost user engagement and retention.
Data-Driven Decisions: Insightful analytics guide strategic initiatives, fostering growth.
Cost Efficiency: Identifying inefficient areas allows targeted improvements and cost reductions.

In e-commerce and media industries, Akamai mPulse is often utilized to ensure seamless user experiences, crucial for retaining customers and viewers. This is achieved by leveraging its robust data analytics to fine-tune web performance, meeting industry-specific demands for speed and reliability.

Akamai

Dynatrace is advancing observability for today’s digital businesses, helping to transform the complexity of modern digital ecosystems into powerful business assets. By leveraging AI-powered insights, Dynatrace enables organizations to analyze, automate, and innovate faster to drive their business forward. To learn more about how Dynatrace can help your business, visit www.dynatrace.com, visit our blog and follow us on LinkedIn and X @dynatrace.

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

TD Bank, Zurich North America, Accenture, Macquarie, United Airlines, Raymond James, BT, Vodafone, Air France-KLM, TELUS, American Airlines, Air Canada, ADT, Virgin Money

Akamai mPulse vs. Dynatrace