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Akamai mPulse vs Dynatrace comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

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
57th
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
6
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 (5th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Akamai mPulse is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 5.5%, down from 10.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dynatrace5.5%
Akamai mPulse0.6%
Other93.9%
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.
Manish Indupuri - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It provides a great overview for management regarding user experience."
"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's a good relationship between the price and the licences."
"The most valuable feature is the solutions overall performance. It is very efficient and accurate for our usage."
"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."
"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."
"It provides real-time monitoring for performance and availability of specific portions of the website without a significant data overhead."
"We chose Dynatrace, because it is good at monitoring the PCF and also the performance platform is very nice."
"It is useful for analytics, web performance, end-to-end coverage of a user experience, and database analytics. It is absolutely a monitoring tool that is worth having. The visibility that it provides is a unique feature of this product."
"The one thing we have tried the most is the microservice monitoring, and this product seems best when compared to other vendors."
"Daily metrics which us analyze the page composition and the corresponding performance metrics so we can quickly and easily determine when something has changed, to aid in root cause analysis."
"The server monitoring is very accurate in this tool. We are able to prevent many critical Incidents."
"Just go with Dynatrace. Just start with Dynatrace. Do not go into AppMon."
"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."
"Dynatrace has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to see very quick action whenever there is an issue with production."
 

Cons

"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 end-to-end distributor tracing connectivity isn't there."
"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."
"It needs a more intuitive GUI and more customization options."
"On the side of the end user experience, I would suggest adding a new service for analyzing the backtrace of users."
"The pricing is a little high, but still cheaper than competitors because Dynatrace at least has pay-as-you-go."
"They could have a better user interface, better automation, better support for cloud-based, and SaaS applications."
"We're not quite there yet, but the thing I would like to see is to really have that view of how issues relate to the business. Often enough, the tools that IT have for IT stop at the IT level. They cannot go into the business level part. They can't understand, because they don't have the information that the business needs to provide them with - for example how much an hour of downtime costs the business. For us, in IT, it's an hour of downtime, but it equates to money and equates to hours lost and equates to a lot of things, and often enough we don't have that information. This is where I would like to see us going."
"Improvements in Synthetic monitoring would be great. Certain features of thick client, if available in the web interface, would also be a great improvement."
"There are two main features that we're very interested in. Number one is, when the tool ingests data from other tools, being able to correlate those with the existing topology, so that the AI engine can draw more conclusions in case Dynatrace does not monitor those instances."
"We would like to see more dashboarding capabilities and the ability to export custom reports."
"From the Dynatrace SaaS platform, they talk about the APIs. The approach they take is, "We create the APIs, you use them however you want." I like it, that gives us flexibility. But at the same time, if your company does not have a huge number of APM specialists, or it does not have the time and resources available to spend on these kind of technology developments, it would be helpful if there were out-of-the-box solutions available from the platform. I would certainly consider that, because that would make us go to market much faster, rather than redeveloping our own solutions based on those APIs."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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. ​"
"Always gives good ROI and total cost of ownership."
"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."
"It's expensive."
"The setup costs for Dynatrace are low, however licensing costs are high."
"We are buying more licenses, because we are seeing more value."
"We found an issue within the first week of ownership that has been costing us more than the entire license cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise300
 

Questions from the Community

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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...
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...
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...
 

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
Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai mPulse vs. Dynatrace and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,915 professionals have used our research since 2012.