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Datadog vs Dynatrace vs Instana Dynamic APM 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 August 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 8.5%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 10.2%, down from 12.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 1.0%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer820579 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Muhammad Jawwad Hassan - PeerSpot reviewer
A really good GUI that is easy for non-technical users to understand
Our company uses the solution for one of our bank clients. We use App Connect middleware to monitor services and applications such as Docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB, and MS SQL Server. We also monitor the bottleneck for all servers.  We currently have 20 users at one of our branches. We plan to expand…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has helped our organization with custom events to track specific cases."
"Datadog helps us detect issues early on and helps in troubleshooting."
"We have been able to set very specific CPU and memory alerts, at the very base level, then we started to pull real business value, like 99th percentile response rates for our API calls."
"It has saved us a lot of trouble in implementation."
"The flexibility to create notebooks and dashboards and fully customize them gives us a lot of power to track the exact services and endpoints we are working on."
"It is great that creating an incident is possible from Slack while having all the relevant data in Datadog."
"Datadog has a lot of features to be able to drill down deep into the swath of logs that our platforms generate."
"Several critical dashboards were created years ago and are still in use today."
"Great for monitoring critical internal and public-facing applications."
"Dynatrace has allowed us to pinpoint quickly any pain points our clients experience with our applications and respond accordingly."
"The primary use case is to monitor all our applications. We want a single place where we can monitor all our applications that we are building. Therefore, if something goes wrong, we immediately can find out what went wrong."
"Dynatrace can look into application transactions at the packet level, which pretty much relieves us of the work of manually collecting, analyzing, summarizing, and presenting the data, as we had done in the past."
"It seems to be very stable. We have not had any outages attributed to the product."
"Dynatrace's documentation is great. I love the university."
"The installation and configuration were very straightforward and nice."
"It's great tool for building dashboards related to application performance.​"
"We can easily perform root cause analysis using the tool."
"If a key monitored value has crossed a threshold, it sends out an alert. And the solution is able to intelligently find out if something is beyond the range that it normally resides in."
"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."
"It is a stable solution."
"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."
"The detailing of our application behavior and user experience is most valuable. In case there is an issue, we typically use Instana to figure it out. We can drill down to the application and figure out what's going on and where the issue is."
"The overall capabilities are the most valuable."
 

Cons

"It is very difficult to make the solutions fit perfectly for large organizations, especially in terms of high cardinality objects and multi-tenancy, where the data needs to be rolled up to a summarized level while maintaining its individual data granularity and identifiers."
"While the tool is robust with many different capabilities, users would greatly benefit from more examples in the documentation."
"A tool as powerful as Datadog is, understandably, going to have a bit of a learning curve, especially for new team members who are unfamiliar with the bevy of features it offers."
"We did have an issue where a synthetic test was set up before the holiday break, and we were quickly charged a great amount. Our team worked with Datadog, and they were able to help us out since it was inadvertent on our end and was a user error."
"The logging could be improved in the future."
"Graph filters for logs need to be set manually which works well for JSON but not for unstructured logs."
"The query performance could be improved, particularly when handling large datasets, as slower response times can hinder efficiency."
"Datadog has a lot of documentation, but a lot of that documentation assumes you know how the service works, which can lead to confusion."
"They should provide a guide to arrive at the solution for non-super experts."
"Need better mapping to true business service rather than purely technical monitoring."
"I would say that this solution's reports are lacking a little bit, and because of this, you have to rely on API to fetch and pull data. I think they could have done a bit of a better job by providing a more user-friendly search from a reporting perspective."
"Every time I want to see the PurePath, I have to launch the client. It would be helpful if they introduced this in the browser application."
"So far, we have not achieved the benefit of preventing issues."
"The heavy client is not really user-friendly and the concepts (while powerful) are unintuitive."
"In AppMon, the performance could be improved. That is the one thing I am most interested in."
"Data streaming and dashboard loading can be improved to reduce dashboard latency."
"Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, leading to compatibility issues within the network monitoring."
"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."
"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."
"They could improve the product’s dashboards and provide more dashboard options."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"The App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes."
"The solution's monitoring is pretty weak and should be improved."
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"The pricing and licensing through AWS Marketplace has been good. It would be nice if it was cheaper, but their pricing is reasonable for what it is. Sometimes, for their newer features, they charge as if it's fully fleshed out, even though it is a newer feature and it may have less stuff than their other items."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"This is an expensive solution, but it is also worth the money."
"It is quite expensive for startups."
"It is quite costly. Dynatrace was the most expensive, compared to the other products we looked at. But it was also a lot better. If you want value for your money, Dynatrace is the way to go."
"Product pricing can seem a little over complex, however this is minor and does not detract from the benefits of the solution."
"It's more expensive than other solutions, but worth it. We use full APM monitoring on our primary systems, but only resource monitoring on lesser systems. We shift licenses around our environment when a deeper dive into lesser systems is required."
"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. ​"
"We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good."
"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."
"The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."
"Its pricing isn't a big pain point. Its pricing seems to be better than some of the other competing products in the market, but they also have some of the features and functionalities that are better than Instana."
"Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to other vendors."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."
"The solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"Pricing is quite competitive. Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic were all several times more expensive than Instana, both the on-prem and the SaaS versions. Price-wise they are a lot more competitive than anyone else out there."
"It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
28%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about Instana Dynamic APM?
The platform’s most valuable feature is the ability to monitor the performance of containers for request and response...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Instana Dynamic APM?
I rate the pricing a seven out of ten. There are no additional costs associated with the product.
What needs improvement with Instana Dynamic APM?
Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, lead...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Daxko Lifts Fitness Studios Through COVID Regulations with Quick Engineering PivotsAltissia Meets SLAs to Support Student DeadlinesImmocloud Unlocks Observability to Modernize Real EstateEnento Group Boosts Service Reliability with Real-Time Visibility into Application Performance Instana’s Observability for Amazon EKS Helps Yara Deliver Digital Farming Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: August 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.