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Catchpoint vs Datadog vs Splunk AppDynamics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 June 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Catchpoint is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 8.6%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk AppDynamics is 4.6%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

AnmolRai - PeerSpot reviewer
Valuable monitoring features enhance ecommerce experience while improvement needed in region-specific insights
As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues. We are currently using an external tool, Splunk, for reporting. If we could receive similar data for the China market as we do for North America and Asia Pacific, this would be helpful.
Kevin Palmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation
Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.
Gyanesh Rahatekar - PeerSpot reviewer
Application performance management and error resolution improved with data-driven insights
Dynatrace has multiple functions compared to Splunk AppDynamics, so Splunk AppDynamics should add those functions, which are not available as of now. Dynatrace has a universal agent that collects all information related to their CI, and if one CI has multiple languages, then there is no need to instrument multiple agents. However, Splunk AppDynamics requires multiple agents; if I have one server with multiple applications in different languages, then I need to instrument different agents for each application. Splunk AppDynamics should work with Dynatrace with one single universal agent that works with all application languages, eliminating the need for multiple implementations.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We really need the API monitoring, as well as client side session monitoring, the global synthetic monitoring, to track the availability of the systems from the customer side."
"The drill-down feature of this product was very good. It allowed us to identify the exact page or area of the site that was causing our customers an issue."
"Catchpoint helped us establish that something is in a provider network, so we could tell our customers to check their internet provider because the traffic is not getting to us. You need to be gentle when you tell them that, but the fact that we could do it was crucial."
"The product's most valuable feature is the ability to identify and troubleshoot network issues."
"Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SLAs signed with the end users. The tool is easy to learn."
"The thing I like most is the tech support in this company, because they have 24/7 chat support. We can chat immediately and ask them about an issue and they keep responding. They create tickets on our behalf and respond."
"The best feature in Catchpoint is the alert or the notification my company gets frequently, in particular, every five minutes. It's the notification you get whenever a respective market has an issue. There's also a dashboard in Catchpoint that shows the markets you support, so all the markets will be highlighted graphically in the dashboard whenever there's downtime that could affect you. If there's no issue for a specific market, it will be in green, so in this way, anybody would be able to understand which market has issues and which market has no issues through Catchpoint. The tool is very useful for monitoring activities."
"During business hours, it has worked absolutely fine without any issues."
"Straightforward to integrate and automate."
"This is definitely a good product and I would consider them one of the leaders within the application monitoring and cloud monitoring space."
"Monitors have also been very valuable when setting up our on-call processes. It makes it easy to set up and adjust alerting to keep our teams aware of anything going wrong."
"The most valuable features of Datadog are the flexibility and additional features when compared to other solutions, such as AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Some of the features include AI and ML capabilities and cloud and analysis monitoring"
"Datadog agents act as an integration to different services, providing easy access and management."
"We have hundreds of microservices, and knowing how top-level requests weave throughout all of them is invaluable."
"Profiling has been made easier."
"The most valuable feature I have found is the elastic container service."
"Provides good overall application performance and transaction errors."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the ability to discover and track transactions."
"We used AppDynamics to identify gaps and bottlenecks in the software."
"AppDynamics is easy to implement if you follow the documentation, and the documentation that they provide is good."
"Transition tracing is the most valuable is pretty easy and useful, but the user experience piece is also good."
"The best feature of AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring is that it lets you find errors in synthetic jobs ahead of the users. The solution shows you all front-end metrics. You can also see JavaScript errors and jQuery errors through AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring. You can also do a correlation between the front end and the backend, or from the user to the navigator, to the backend through the solution."
"Provides monitoring more around business processes versus just servers, applications, etc. E.g., with complex systems, where a business process passes across multiple applications, the business needs us to monitor the heath of the process, not just a segment of the application."
"It provides a lot of data, so it helps businesses identify their user base."
 

Cons

"The product could include global monitoring and predictive analytics to identify widespread issues and cyber threats."
"It would be great if Catchpoint could incorporate its alerting system instead of relying on separate tools like ServiceNow."
"The old user version was better, it was more user-friendly."
"Catchpoint can be improved by focusing solely on network monitoring."
"A large selection of nodes are available but it is a challenge to test reliably in China and the Middle East."
"There's still too much manual involvement in getting customized test configurations out there. It's good, but it still takes a lot of effort. In other words, it's when you need to configure it to collect a specific variable and that kind of thing."
"A room for improvement in Catchpoint is that it lacks an automated page updating feature. My company receives all the alerts and notifications it needs, but the page doesn't update automatically. You need to manually refresh the page, so every five minutes you need to refresh it to see the most updated information. If there's an automated page refresh feature, that would help my company. It's a feature that Grafana has. The page auto-refreshes in Grafana, so you don't have to manually refresh the page. If that feature is implemented in Catchpoint, it'll be useful for the users. Another area for improvement in the tool is you have to do a manual task, for example, when you have a notification for a market, you get a zip code that the user could have entered, but if the zip code is incorrect, you have to manually go into Catchpoint and update that parameter, so that manual step is another area in the tool that needs improvement."
"As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues."
"Their security features could be improved. We looked at their Security Monitoring feature but it was early in its development. Datadog are just getting into the security space so I'm sure this will improve in the future."
"We need more integration functionality, including certain metrics integration."
"It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience."
"It does not have the best interface."
"I love to have some DD guru come in and do a department training directly at our setup."
"Interactive tutorials could be a game changer."
"The logging could be improved in the future."
"We have contact with many customers that cover many areas, so we have cases where the infrastructure administration could be improved."
"The synthetic scripting for end-user monitoring could be a little bit broader. Instead of using just Python, they can include a few other languages so that not everyone has to jump on the bandwagon for Python and do Selenium scripting. They can open up that a bit to make it simpler for people to do the scripting."
"SQL statement monitoring"
"AppDynamics is new to the cloud and could improve its cloud services, they are following a monolithic monitoring approach."
"The integration ability of AppDynamics with other performance testing tools is an area with shortcomings where improvements are required."
"The major concern lies with reports, specifically their configurability. It's like, if I want to combine multiple reports and generate them all at once, that's not possible. Even though there's a setup for generating 25 reports, I wanted to group them all and generate them in one go, which isn't currently feasible. I have to manually run each report and set the time for it."
"Installation and configuration can be very tough. An average user without specialized knowledge can't do this. You need to have DevOps and QA teams handle it. During installation, a lot of customers get stuck trying to track the database or the API part, and they have to contact customer support."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"This product has an issue with initial lag upon opening that we would like to see improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price and licensing are very, very high. They have to come down on the pricing to match with the industry standard."
"The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models."
"The pricing is based on consumption and works on a point scale. For example, let's say I want to look at www.google.com, and I'm going to test it to see if it's there. It will bring back all this data that tells me how long it took to connect and how long it took to get the first byte. It will list all the resources on the page, showing that they all work and there are no broken links. It brings that data back. That test has an assigned point value depending on what you decide to extract from that test. If all I do is check to see whether it's available, it might be one point. I don't know the exact point values off-hand. This is just an example."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to the last tool we were using."
"In terms of licensing fees, I believe they were slightly higher."
"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"I would say the solution is affordable because it is widely used across financial service sectors."
"The solution is highly expensive"
"As compared to other applications, its price is moderate. Its price is neither very high nor very low."
"AppDynamics is priced on the higher side."
"There is an annual cost to use this solution. The licensing model could be improved by making it more cost-effective."
"Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace was good."
"If one is expensive and ten is low price, I rate the product price as seven out of ten."
"There is a license for the solution and we paid approximately $2,000. There is also an additional cost above the standard license which cost us approximately $3,000."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
33%
Financial Services Firm
19%
Retailer
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Educational Organization
20%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
34%
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Catchpoint?
Catchpoint is very flexible and also provides logs for troubleshooting purposes. It helps us fix issues within the SL...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Catchpoint?
The solution's pricing varies based on services and licensing models. Clients typically see significant operational a...
What needs improvement with Catchpoint?
As part of the improvement, there are certain categories, like for the China market, where we face issues. We are cur...
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...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AppDynamics?
I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten. The solution is highly expensive. Our company pays for the solution on ...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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
Cisco, Sony, Nasdaq, Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Edmunds.com, Puma, Fox News, DirecTV, Pizza Hut, T-Systems, Cornell University, OpenTable, BITMARCK, Green Mountain Power, Care.com, Overstock, Paddy Power, eHarmony, Kraft, The Motley Fool, The Container Store, and more See more customers
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: June 2025.
856,856 professionals have used our research since 2012.