SolarWinds AppOptics vs Splunk AppDynamics comparison

SolarWinds and Splunk are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. SolarWinds is ranked #56, while Splunk is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.2. SolarWinds holds a 0.3% mindshare in APM, compared to Splunk’s 4.6% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of SolarWinds users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of Splunk users who would recommend it.

SolarWinds AppOptics

Read 9 SolarWinds AppOptics reviews

971 Views
573 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Splunk AppDynamics

Read 250 Splunk AppDynamics reviews

11,969 Views
9,575 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

SolarWinds AppOptics

Splunk AppDynamics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 17, 2025

Splunk AppDynamics and SolarWinds AppOptics compete in the application performance monitoring category. Splunk AppDynamics holds an advantage due to its comprehensive transaction tracing and diagnostic capabilities.

Features: Splunk AppDynamics offers comprehensive transaction tracing, visibility from business transactions to server performance, and deep dive diagnostics. SolarWinds AppOptics provides end-to-end visibility and offers real-time application performance monitoring, although it lacks some advanced analytics compared to AppDynamics.

Room for Improvement: Splunk AppDynamics could improve its interface, network monitoring, and async calls tracking. SolarWinds AppOptics could enhance implementation sophistication and offer a more centralized toolset.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Splunk AppDynamics supports flexible deployment across cloud and on-premises environments and provides highly rated customer service with technical account managers. SolarWinds AppOptics customers appreciate its straightforward setups but might find differences in support efficiency.

Pricing and ROI: Splunk AppDynamics is a premium tool offering extensive features at a higher cost, seen as valuable for comprehensive monitoring. SolarWinds AppOptics is priced more reasonably, appealing to businesses seeking cost-effective solutions with its node-based licensing structure.

To learn more, read our detailed SolarWinds AppOptics vs. Splunk AppDynamics Report (Updated: August 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds AppOptics vs. Splunk AppDynamics

August 2025

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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

SolarWinds AppOptics

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

56th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

58th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Monitoring Software (43rd)

Splunk AppDynamics

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

4th

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

5th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

250

Ranking in other categories

IT Operations Analytics (2nd), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of SolarWinds AppOptics is 0.3%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk AppDynamics is 4.6%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

John Yuko

Assistant Manager ICT - Projects at I&M Bank Ltd

Unique features allow consolidating and combing metrics into a single dashboard, but don't monitor mobile solutions

I would like to see more granular information provided on Unix applications. Also, the integration with Unix services should be a bit more straightforward in terms having an agent to retrieve your credentials rather than having to enter or save them for SSH on SolarWinds. From the outset, we had to set some commands to log into the search console, and they are saved on the solution, which presents a challenge in terms of exposure. The solution is unable to monitor APK solutions completely because we'd then be forced to break down the APK and provide the APIs or go through the source code. They don't have a module that can analyze an application that is maybe under-used.

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Gyanesh Rahatekar

Back office at Reliance Industries Ltd

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I have found the most valuable feature is application performance management."

"Technical support is always live and they're supportive."

"Some of the most valuable features of SolarWinds are the topology discovery and network performance analysis."

"The reporting of the solution is very good."

"The product has a great dashboard."

"The sum solution, NTA, and DPA."

"Splunk AppDynamics' infrastructure monitoring is satisfactory."

"We have been able to monitor our applications more accurately."

"The most valuable features of AppDynamics is the scalability and monitoring."

"In 2014 and 2015, AppDynamics was one of the best products on the market."

"It helped to find quick solutions for specific business transactions."

"What I like the most about Splunk AppDynamics is the end-to-end observability for the application, along with traces."

"Whenever the application crashes from user behavior, we can easily simulate the error. We are happy with this feature and find it to be valuable."

"It's made it easier to collaborate across teams; be able to have the same data immediately in front of you just by sharing a URL."

More Splunk AppDynamics pros

Cons

"AppOptics would benefit from having a much more centralized view."

"I would like to see more integration with other tools that are available on the market."

"The implementation needs improvement. It needs to get modernized with the newer cloud scenario in both public and private deployment models."

"In terms of the technology, I think they need to put some more advanced troubleshooting into SolarWinds, in terms of AI capabilities. That's the next generation, especially in the cases of APIs which have already adopted AI capabilities into their products."

"The solution should be more user-friendly."

"The integration with Unix services should be a bit more straightforward."

"We constantly need to improve our alert mechanism because we get a lot of false-positive alerts. These are not real errors. In addition, for end-user monitoring, sometimes, we are not able to catch all user activities. Because of not being able to follow the user activity from the start to the end, we are missing out on the performance issues."

"I would like to see support for mobile testing and mobile monitoring."

"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."

"As per my experience, the drill-down feature can be improved at the class level."

"At this time, we don't have much visibility on the virtual environment, monitoring, and all other things. We have visibility only for database monitoring, and we have noticed performance impact when deploying database agents on the database server. We got to know this from AppDynamics support also that we should not deploy database agents from the database server. When agents are deployed on the same server and the database is monitored from there, we are not getting database server metrics. Therefore, we don't have those insights, and sometimes, we struggle because of that. They can improve this functionality so that we do not have a performance impact, and we can deploy anywhere. This would help us a lot. In terms of end-user monitoring, currently, it is not working for us because there are some complexities. It is a little complicated, and it takes a little bit of time to understand where you need to make changes. It would be very helpful if they can provide some template designs for end-user monitoring. When our servers are running on VMs, we don't get many insights from the VM side. I don't know whether it is possible to have visibility beyond the database, server, and application and whether there are some features where we can deploy AppDynamics on VMs as well. Such functionality would give us more control over storage, VM, OS, and database. It will also provide complete visibility of our hardware and software."

"AppDynamics scaled well up to around 3,000 agents. The performance deteriorated after that, while Dynatrace could support more than 10,000 agents. We were surprised that AppDynamics' scalability is not so good."

"When you have high stress of visits I do not know if you are more stress because of the amount of visits or because you have to wait eternal 60 seconds to find out it things are going well or you already have mess."

"If you have a single URL and all the operations are coming in as part of the header, you will not be able to segregate them for different actions."

More Splunk AppDynamics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Since it's a negotiable rate, I would rate the pricing as a five out of five."

"I believe the current licensing cost is reasonable."

"Mostly, it's a perpetual license. We don't have any customers using the subscription right now—it's mostly a perpetual license that the customers purchase. The licensing is based on the number of elements, whereas other solutions are node-based."

"AppDynamics is one of the most expensive solutions on the market."

"There is no standard license instead, the license is adapted to the organization's requirements."

"I would say the solution is affordable because it is widely used across financial service sectors."

"There is an annual cost for the use of this solution."

"Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace was good."

"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."

"AppDynamics is really pricey as it requires licenses for every feature."

"We buy the platform's yearly subscription."

More Splunk AppDynamics pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

29%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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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, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...

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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 focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...

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What do you like most about AppDynamics?

The solution saves time and cost.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dynatrace vs SolarWinds AppOptics

Compared 26% of the time

New Relic vs SolarWinds AppOptics

Compared 23% of the time

Zabbix vs SolarWinds AppOptics

Compared 11% of the time

Zenoss Cloud vs SolarWinds AppOptics

Compared 8% of the time

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs SolarWinds AppOptics

Compared 7% of the time

More SolarWinds AppOptics Competitors

Dynatrace vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 14% of the time

Datadog vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 8% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 8% of the time

New Relic vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 7% of the time

Grafana vs Splunk AppDynamics

Compared 4% of the time

More Splunk AppDynamics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

August 2025

Download SolarWinds AppOptics product report

Buyer's Guide

Splunk AppDynamics

July 2025

Download Splunk AppDynamics product report

Also Known As

AppOptics, SolarWinds TraceView, Librato

No data available

Overview

AppOptics is a SaaS-based simple, powerful and affordable Infrastructure & Application monitoring for custom on-premises, cloud, and hybrid systems.

Your business runs on applications, and when they go down or run slowly, it can impact the business in lost productivity, customers, or revenue. To add to the complexity, your IT environment is changing, and workloads can be spread across data centers, and cloud resources. You need to monitor the availability and performance of applications and infrastructure, regardless of where they are, so you can identify potential issues early and address them before they impact users

SolarWinds

Splunk AppDynamics enhances application performance monitoring with advanced diagnostics and real-time insights, offering seamless end-to-end transaction tracking and infrastructure visibility.

AppDynamics provides critical tools for businesses to analyze application behavior and performance. Through innovative features like transaction snapshot analysis and adaptable dashboards, users can quickly identify and address issues, ensuring high levels of system uptime and efficiency. It is designed to support complex environments including Kubernetes and AWS, enhancing user experience by detecting performance issues early. Despite needing improvements in network monitoring and integration, it remains a robust option for tracking application health.

What are the key features of AppDynamics?

Real-time Performance Monitoring: Offers immediate insights into application behavior.
Business Transaction Tracking: Tracks transactions from start to finish for bottleneck identification.
JVM Memory Monitoring: Provides detailed JVM metrics and memory use information.
Deep-dive Diagnostics: Enables in-depth analysis of code and stack traces.
Adaptable Dashboards: Customizable views for better data interpretation.

How does AppDynamics benefit users?

Improved Incident Resolution: Faster problem detection and solution implementation.
Enhanced Application Performance: Real-time monitoring optimizes system operations.
Comprehensive Visibility: Provides a full view of application infrastructure.
Informed Decision Making: Detailed analytics guide performance improvements.
Customer Satisfaction: Enhances user experience through faster issue resolutions.

In industries like financial services and e-commerce, AppDynamics facilitates performance tracking across distributed systems, optimizing infrastructure to meet consumer demands. It excels in environments needing precise transaction monitoring and is pivotal in delivering high value and satisfaction.

Splunk

Sample Customers

TraxoCovea Insurance BTE TechnologyDatarista

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

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds AppOptics vs. Splunk AppDynamics

August 2025

Free Report: SolarWinds AppOptics vs. Splunk AppDynamics

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