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Actional vs Dynatrace 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

Actional
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
71st
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
SOA Governance (4th)
Dynatrace
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
359
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (6th), Mobile APM (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Actional is 0.6%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 5.0%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dynatrace5.0%
Actional0.6%
Other94.4%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

it_user690762 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
Provides speed and scaling in the cloud
Provides speed and scaling in the cloud Effortless scaling Never throws away data Takes action now Delivers analytics at the speed of business Automates and speeds up system discovery I would like to see better marketing. We have used this for four years. There are no deployment issues at this…
Manish Indupuri - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From a testing standpoint, ignoring license and cost issues, it's not a bad product."
"This tool has great scaling capabilities, i.e., no limitations."
"We use it to monitor over a 1000 servers in AWS."
"The observability provided by Dynatrace is extremely valuable."
"The User experience monitor is a real added value."
"UEM (RUM)​: User Experience Management (real user monitoring) puts you in "user's seat" and gives you insight into how they experience the application. Often, this gives a totally different view than just watching the backend calls."
"Specifically, for the subteams that I'm on, it's very much allowed us to get real insights into the impacts of our changes, see pre- and post-metrics, and be able to provide dashboards for our business, which has been extremely valuable."
"The insights we get via Dynatrace make sure that we can act quickly on incidents, or often even prevent them from happening at all."
"They have a feature that allows you to monitor the user, and we are able to create a VIP customer."
"It helps us get to the resolution quicker, and potentially the root cause, and at least understand what is happening for future identification."
 

Cons

"My concern is with Automation integration."
"I would like to see more features from the desktop client included in the web client."
"I'd like to see more agents ready to be deployed. I know that it's possible to develop integration with Dynatrace API, but in day-to-day operations it's hard to do that kind of customization. So if they had more agents for more platforms and more applications, I think it would be better."
"While designing the business dashboard, I encountered various bugs that impacted my work."
"It is always requiring us to update the Dynatrace client."
"I don't think the limitations are technical at this point, honestly. My limitations are more to do - and maybe it's because of the nature of the job I have - but they have to do with pricing."
"They could also, develop an observability platform where you could have the ability to inject events, locks, and traces."
"The solution is a bit pricey."
"If there is a downside to Dynatrace, the only thing I can think of would be the cost."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The limitations I see are more to do - and maybe it's because of the nature of the job I have - but they have to do with pricing. It's a little bit pricey. It's a very good tool. It's worth the price, to a certain degree. But it's hard to justify when it's that costly."
"Decodes on less used/popular protocols are available, but they should be included. Additional investment should not be required."
"The only limitation with scaling to cloud-native environments is licensing. It all depends on how many DEM units you're willing to license. The more of DEM units that you purchase, the more user data you can collect."
"It is quite expensive for startups."
"​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."
"Dynatrace is an expensive solution."
"From what I have heard in the company, Dynatrace is expensive."
"It's expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business80
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise299
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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 you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...
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 stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Proximus, Air France-KLM, Barratt Developments, Freedom Mortgage
Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
Find out what your peers are saying about Actional vs. Dynatrace and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.