Dynatrace vs Instana Dynamic APM vs New Relic comparison

Dynatrace and Instana are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Dynatrace is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6, while Instana is ranked #29 with an average rating of 8.0. Dynatrace holds a 6.0% mindshare in APM, compared to Instana’s 1.1% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Dynatrace users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 84% of Instana users who would recommend it.

Dynatrace

Read 359 Dynatrace reviews

24,878 Views
17,166 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Instana Dynamic APM

Read 14 Instana Dynamic APM reviews

2,116 Views
2,053 Comparison Views

84% willing to recommend

New Relic

Read 173 New Relic reviews

14,037 Views
10,387 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Dynatrace

Instana Dynamic APM

New Relic

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dynatrace, Instana Dynamic APM, and New Relic based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability.

To learn more, read our detailed Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

March 2026

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Helped 885,444 peers since 2012

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 April 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Dynatrace is 6.0%, down from 11.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 1.1%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of New Relic is 4.0%, down from 7.2% 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	6.0%
New Relic	4.0%
Instana Dynamic APM	1.1%
Other	88.9%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

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

Muhammad Jawwad Hassan

IT Consultant at Arcana Info

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…

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BasilJiji

System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

Real-time alerts have reduced server outage impact and support fast incident response

In the dashboard, if they could show a little more metrics regarding the application and related things, that would be how New Relic could be improved. Currently, there are things showing from the server level and application level, but it can be improved. That is what I felt. Regarding user interface, I do not feel much concern, but for some kind of issues when we are trying to get support from the New Relic team, their SLA seems to be long. They are taking seven to ten working days for resolving some kind of scenario or issue. That is a bit difficult for us. If they could improve the customer support by reducing their SLA within three to five days, if they could remediate everything, that will be so much helpful. When it comes to the customer support part, I felt they need to be a little more improved on that part. The support overall is good, but they can improve. That is the reason I have given it eight out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features are end user visibility, Smartscape, and the entire visibility of our data center, including SQL queries."

"It is an amazing tool for application root cause analysis and business function analytics"

"Dynatrace Managed has given us an in-depth, comprehensive view of every single layer of the entire application stack in a single, easy-to-use point of access."

"This solution has helped us to reduce the time to detect the root cause incident and also to avoid missing incidents."

"We scaled from 300 agents to 800 agents in six months. There were no issues at the server level, which is pretty good."

"Dynatrace helped us to get a better understanding of how our services are communicating with each other, as well as better problem detection before something really breaks."

"It identifies problem areas and performance issues."

"The real-user monitoring is mostly used to gauge the difference in performance for multitenant applications, This is so we can discern if there are any local network or client-facing issues when we do a comparison between each customer. It is quite important for us to be able to identify a client-side issue, as opposed to a feature managed problem, because we're essentially providing managed services of business applications."

More Dynatrace pros

"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."

"It is a stable solution."

"The detailing of our application behavior and user experience is most valuable, and in case there is an issue, we typically use Instana to figure it out, drilling down to the application to understand what's going on and where the issue is."

"Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."

"The primary selling point of this product is its unparalleled transparency into the infrastructure."

"It is user-friendly, but we encounter issues processing input and understanding the graphics, such as seeing a flatline without knowing the cause. When these problems occur, I have to contact my support team to address and fix them. Also, monitoring processing is good."

"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."

"The most valuable feature of Instana Dynamic APM is auto-instrumentation."

More Instana Dynamic APM pros

"New Relic has positively impacted my organization by helping with our observability goals."

"It doesn't require much investment or technical expertise to implement, and I would recommend it for SME."

"We like the performance of the product."

"Reduced the worry in supporting live websites."

"The thing that's nice about New Relic is it doesn't try and do everything, it does what it does."

"To me, the most valuable feature of New Relic APM is the traceability, mainly based on the time travel method, so you get the overall response time, which is pretty helpful for developers and ADR techs looking into issues on a deeper level. New Relic APM is a very good, tailor-made solution."

"As soon as it monitors all our systems and is integrated with PagerDuty, the operations team just needs to wait for alerts on their cellphones to fix things."

"The ability to do layered reporting quickly and in real-time on stats is the most valuable feature to us."

More New Relic pros

Cons

"I haven't had a chance to go through all of it, but I would like to see the ability, from an administrative standpoint, for it to collect statistics. I want to be able to see the servers that the agents are installed on. I want it to be able to start doing collections for me by platform: How many Linux servers do I have? How many Windows servers do I have? Statistically give me the information of how things are performing, but I want that in a dashboard, where I can look at a dashboard and I can look at a section. So the ability for me to drill down will make it easier for me."

"The installation process had quite a few moving parts, so it was a little tricky getting everything to work in first go."

"Its needs to focus more on open source areas, like Apache umbrella products and availability motioning areas."

"I have not had very positive experiences with tech support in the last year. I found them to be arrogant, rude, not solving my problems, and not interested in solving my problems."

"One of the features that we are lacking is on the reports side. We don't have much reporting available. And the dashboards. I checked on their blog and they said that they are working on the dashboard front where you can create the dashboards. We do have dashboards available. They said they are bringing in a lot of things there, so I'm looking forward to that, on reports."

"End-to-end monitoring could use more default dashboards."

"Some of the analytics that you get in, e.g., a waterfall analysis of a web page could be clearer. A lot of that is not directly attributable to Dynatrace. Sometimes a vendor will implement a tag or JavaScript plugin that's named something entirely different than what it does. This makes it difficult to track that from the waterfall list, figure out where exactly that component is, and dig more into what it's doing. Dynatrace could probably improve a bit on that waterfall layout to make it clearer as to what exactly is there. It does a wonderful job of telling you what loads and when, but it could be improved in terms of telling me what exactly it is loading."

"There are lots of features to share information, but we need to learn to leverage that, both on the web browser and on the mobile app."

More Dynatrace cons

"They could improve the product’s dashboards and provide more dashboard options."

"PHP was less stable. The coverage of Python versions was maybe less than it could be, but we didn't have any stability issues with Python, as such."

"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."

"Many managers, as well as our customers, used to ask for reports, such as "top X number of queries that are slow," or "top pages that have the highest number of issues." This is something that can be improved by Instana. Currently, they don't have that kind of reporting available out-of-the-box."

"The App Connect middleware does not integrate with or show corresponding sub nodes."

"The auto-remediation features must be improved."

"The API monitoring aspect could be better."

"Maybe log monitoring could be better."

More Instana Dynamic APM cons

"The docs in API and dashboards seem to be a little behind and overly verbose, I don’t want to have to jump back and forth."

"Sometimes it works really slow, but I think it depends on the organization-to-organization usage."

"The deployment process could be improved."

"Data Dog captures the entire session and then provides it as a video player path, which gives more insight into what the user was doing. It's pretty impressive. New Relic does that, yet it only captures using a couple of screenshots, which is not very detailed since you are unable to see the entire user flow."

"It gives you amazing statistics, but doesn’t give you enough information about what to do with the statistics."

"The UX/UI design of New Relic APM could be improved. The solution currently has some slow pages in terms of loading and viewing the pages, for example, the reports. The reports and other pages take a long time to load."

"The product has good documentation for Linux, however, their documentation for Windows is lacking substantially."

"I would like to have storage monitoring. E.g., being able to monitor SANS, specifically protocols, like NFS and CIFS metrics."

More New Relic cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price (of the product) is a major concern for all the clients I work with."

"We have a three-year contract. We have 30 licenses for the full stack and 3 licenses for the DEM unit."

"Dynatrace is an expensive solution."

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

"The product is really fast to implement and gives customers instant value. This is important, because it reduces costs on the implementation."

"It is quite expensive for startups."

"We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good."

"Make sure your leadership buy-in is in place. Ensure leadership understands that an APM solution is a fairly expensive, so they know what they are getting into."

More Dynatrace pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."

"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."

"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."

"The solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."

"Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies 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."

"It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."

"We spend somewhere around $5,000 to $6,000 per month with an annual recommitment of maybe $60,000. These are just ballpark figures."

"This is an expensive tool."

"We deploy everything on AWS. Purchasing the product on AWS Marketplace made it easier for us."

"The solution is priced reasonably. New Relic APM is one of the best products for me because it's economical, so anyone can easily pick it over other solutions and use it."

"The detection piece of it brings us a big return on investment."

"Because of budget, we are not using the mobile app part of this tool."

"I recommend using the free version of New Relic. If you like the free version and understand its importance for your company, you can move to the trial. Then, you can migrate to the paid version."

"The pricing could be better. We did not purchase the full version. Maybe if we applied all the other features of the full version of New Relic, we could get all the features that we feel are missing."

More New Relic pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Retailer

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	78
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	299

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	65
Midsize Enterprise	50
Large Enterprise	77

Questions from the Community

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...

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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 sta...

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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,...

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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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Instana Dynamic APM?

Sometimes, the issue arises from user changes, such as adjusting firewall settings without proper consideration, lead...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Instana Dynamic APM?

We use the solution to monitor the platform. If an issue arises, like a user experiencing errors, we can identify gen...

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What do you like most about New Relic Insights?

The product's initial setup phase was very easy.

See all answers

What needs improvement with New Relic Insights?

I have noticed discrepancies between New Relic's documentation and Terraform resources. For example, there have been ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for New Relic Insights?

My day-to-day activities in New Relic include infrastructure monitoring, APM monitoring, browser monitoring, and data...

See all answers

Comparisons

Datadog vs Dynatrace

Compared 8% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Dynatrace

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Dynatrace

Compared 3% of the time

Avantra vs Dynatrace

Compared 3% of the time

Elastic Observability vs Dynatrace

Compared 2% of the time

More Dynatrace Competitors

Splunk AppDynamics vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 9% of the time

Datadog vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 7% of the time

Broadcom DX Application Performance Management vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 6% of the time

ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 4% of the time

ITRS Geneos vs Instana Dynamic APM

Compared 4% of the time

More Instana Dynamic APM Competitors

Datadog vs New Relic

Compared 7% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs New Relic

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Monitor vs New Relic

Compared 2% of the time

WhatsUp Gold vs New Relic

Compared 2% of the time

Elastic Observability vs New Relic

Compared 2% of the time

More New Relic Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Dynatrace

March 2026

Download Dynatrace product report

Buyer's Guide

Instana Dynamic APM

March 2026

Download Instana Dynamic APM product report

Buyer's Guide

New Relic

March 2026

Download New Relic product report

Also Known As

No data available

New Relic Browser, New Relic Applied Intelligence, New Relic Insights, New Relic Synthetics, New Relic Servers, New Relic APM

Overview

Dynatrace is an AI-powered software intelligence monitoring platform that accelerates digital transformation and simplifies cloud complexities. Dynatrace is an entirely automated full-stack solution that provides data and answers about the performance of your applications and deep insight into every transaction throughout every application, including the end-user experience. By modernizing and automating enterprise cloud operations, users can deliver an optimal digital experience with higher quality software to customers faster.

Dynatrace offers an all-in-one automated artificial intelligence solution that brings together application performance, cloud and infrastructure, and digital experience monitoring. Dynatrace accelerates performance-driven results through operations, development, and business teams with a shared metrics platform. In addition, users are provided a full-stack monitoring experience with three patented technologies:

Smartscape - visualization mechanism that maps the totality of everything working in your environment and detects any casual dependencies between your applications, processes, websites, services, hosts, cloud infrastructure, and networks.
OneAgent - a technology that analyzes, gathers ,and unifies all business performance metrics throughout every layer of your technology stack.
PurePath Technology - code-level context and timings are captured from the mainframe to the cloud for all end-to-end transactions.

What does Dynatrace offer?

Dynatrace redefines how organizations monitor their digital ecosystems. The solution offers:

Cloud Automation: With AI engine Davis®, users can see the exact reason for problems and facilitate quick auto-remediation and intelligent cloud orchestration.
Application Security: With automated application vulnerability management, users can deliver applications faster and more securely.
Infrastructure Monitoring: Convenient broad visibility across your environments is provided with streamlined, automated infrastructure monitoring.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): Optimize your applications, provide better support, and improve user experience with a combination of Real User Monitoring (RUM), Session Replay, and synthetic monitoring throughout your environment.
Applications and Microservices: For complex cloud environments, Dynatrace can automatically provide visibility and root-cause answers. It can also monitor microservices.
Digital Business Analytics: Get AI-powered, real-time answers to analytical business queries with KPIs and metrics that are already flowing through applications.

Reviews from Real Users

Dynatrace is the only solution that provides answers to organizations based on deep insight into each user, transaction, and organization's environment.

Barry P., a managing performance engineer at Medica Health Plans, writes, "With Dynatrace, we have synthetic checks and real-user monitoring of all of our websites, places where members and providers can interact with us over the web. We monitor the response times of those with Dynatrace, and it's all integrated into one place."

A consultant at a tech service company notes, "A feature that's one of the highlights of Dynatrace is the AI. The second most valuable feature is OneAgent. Between infrastructures, applications, operating systems, you can deploy with just a single agent and can practically install and forget about it."

Dynatrace

Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated Application Performance Monitoring, discovers and maps all services, infrastructure, and their inter-dependencies automatically. Instana ingests all observability metrics, traces each request, profiles every process, and updates application dependency maps in real-time to deliver the context and actionable feedback needed by Dev+Ops to optimize application performance, enable innovation, and mitigate risk to help them add value and efficiency to the pipeline. Learn more at https://instana.com.

Instana

New Relic offers real-time application monitoring and insight into performance bottlenecks. Its customizable dashboards and APM integration provide efficient operational support, while server performance alerts ensure quick issue detection.

New Relic provides comprehensive monitoring of application performance, tracking bottlenecks across databases and front-end components. Users employ it for server and infrastructure monitoring, as well as analyzing key metrics such as CPU and memory usage. The solution's ability to integrate with tools like PagerDuty enhances incident management capabilities. However, users have expressed a need for improvements in query language simplicity, more detailed historical insights, and better mobile app monitoring support.

What are New Relic's most important features?

Real-Time Monitoring: Provides instant visibility into application performance.
Detailed Transaction Tracing: Identifies specific transaction issues quickly.
Error Rate Tracking: Monitors and reports on error occurrences efficiently.
Customizable Dashboards: Tailors dashboard views for specific needs.
APM Integration: Seamlessly integrates with application performance management tools.

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Operational Efficiency: Quick issue detection reduces downtime.
Improved Debugging: Enhanced error analysis supports rapid problem resolution.
Comprehensive Monitoring: Offers a holistic view of application performance and user behavior.
Incident Management: Integration with incident tools helps streamline responses.
Efficient Alerts: Rapid alert systems ensure timely notifications of issues.

In industries like e-commerce and financial services, New Relic supports application performance monitoring to enhance user experience and system reliability. Organizations leverage its insights for optimizing performance, particularly in server operations and infrastructure management. Its ability to monitor API failures through synthetic monitoring is crucial for maintaining high service levels.

New Relic

Sample Customers

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

World Fuel Services, Verizon, FootLocker, McDonald's, Trainline, Mondia Media, Confused, Costa Coffee, Ryanair, Marks & Spencer, William Hill, Delivery Hero, Skyscanner, BASF, DAZN, Veygo, Virtuo, movingimage, talabat, Australia Post, Tokopedia, Seven Network, Virgin Australia, Zomato, BigBasket, Mercado Libre, Lending Club

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

March 2026

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