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Akamai mPulse vs Elastic Observability 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
58th
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Elastic Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (13th), Log Management (16th), Container Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 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 Elastic Observability is 1.7%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Elastic Observability1.7%
Akamai mPulse0.6%
Other97.7%
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.
Mohammed-Abdelalim - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Has provided powerful customization for unique monitoring needs but needs more out-of-the-box capabilities
In my opinion, the best features of Elastic Observability are their flexibility to integrate with other existing systems and the ability to build a unified monitoring tool that can integrate with existing ones and end-to-end user journeys which require a lot of customizations. The greatest feature in Elastic is the ability to customize. This is similar to my comments about customizable dashboards in Elastic because it's visible to the analyst. However, it's very great. Customizing these dashboards can meet the customer's specific use cases and specific stories that they have in their environment, their special environment that doesn't look like other environments. The dashboarding in Elastic is highly customizable to the level of logos. If the customer wants his company logo in the dashboard, it can be done.

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."
"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 most valuable feature is the solutions overall performance. It is very efficient and accurate for our usage."
"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."
"It provides real-time monitoring for performance and availability of specific portions of the website without a significant data overhead."
"It provides a great overview for management regarding user experience."
"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."
"All the features that we use, such as monitoring, dashboarding, reporting, the possibility of alerting, and the way we index the data, are important."
"From my experience with several major customers, the most valued feature of Elastic is its log analytics capabilities."
"We use AppDynamics and Elastic. The reason why we're using Elastic APM is because of the license count. It's very favorable compared to AppDynamics. It's inexpensive; it's economical."
"Machine learning is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"It is scalable and supports multitenancy, which is beneficial for MSPs."
"The solution has been stable in our usage."
"I found Elk to be excellent for log analytics, security analytics, application code-level analytics, collaboration with DevOps teams, CI/CD, microservices, and Kubernetes, specifically cloud-native or cloud-specific tasks."
"It is a powerful tool that allows users to collect and transform logs as needed, enabling flexible visualization and analysis."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"Simplifying the parsing of logs and manual efforts would also be beneficial."
"More web features could be added to the product."
"One example is the inability to monitor very old databases with the newest version."
"Elastic Observability needs to have better standardization, logging, and schema."
"The price is the only issue in the solution. It can be made better and cheaper."
"The tool's scalability involves a more complex implementation process. It requires careful calculations to determine the number of nodes needed, the specifications of each node, and the configuration of hot, warm, and cold zones for data storage. Additionally, managing log retention policies adds further complexity. The solution's pricing also needs to be cheaper."
"I would advise others to use a different solution than Elastic APM."
"The only challenging aspect for new users is often writing the query language."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The product is not that cheap."
"The product’s pricing needs improvement."
"We have been using the open-source version."
"Since we are a huge company, Elastic Observability is an affordable solution for us."
"One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now."
"There are two types: cloud and SaaS. They charge based on data ingestion, ingest rate, hard retention, and warm retention. I believe it costs around $25,000 annually to ingest 30GB of data daily. That is the SaaS version. There is also a self-managed license where the customer manages their own infrastructure on-prem. In such cases, there are three license tiers that respectively cost $5,000 annually per node, $7,000 per node, and $12,500 per node."
"So far, there are just the standard licensing fees. Several of the components are embedded in the license or are even open source. They're even free depending on what you use, which makes it even more appealing to someone that is discussing pricing of the solution."
"Elastic Observability is cheaper than other similar solutions, such as Dynatrace. Its license calculation is based on various factors like data volume and physical infrastructure, particularly related to RAM capacity."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
The problem is their licensing model, which is a bit confusing. Many customers struggle to understand their total cost of ownership because Elastic licensing is not dependent on easy, quantifiable ...
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
After careful consideration about areas for improvement in Elastic Observability, aspects such as pricing, customization, implementation, and scalability could be improved. As a user of the system,...
What is your primary use case for Elastic Observability?
My use case for Elastic Observability is observability, as we upload our customers' data, including logs, and when there is an issue, we can analyze what went wrong.
 

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
PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai mPulse vs. Elastic Observability and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,948 professionals have used our research since 2012.