No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

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

"This tool has great scaling capabilities, i.e., no limitations."
"From a testing standpoint, ignoring license and cost issues, it's not a bad product."
"We can see issues that occur, sometimes before the clients do. Before we have client (or end user) calls for issues, we are able to start troubleshooting and even resolve those issues. We can quickly identify the root cause and impact of the issues as they occur, and this is very helpful for providing the best client experience."
"Dynatrace is a powerful tool for full stack monitoring with APM capabilities and AI root cause problem analysis. This helps our customers with their digital transformation and gaining insight into their infrastructure."
"We're able to tell them which calls, which methods, which interface were the problem."
"The Dynatrace solution has an important role in optimizing application code and SQL queries for customer solutions."
"Quick Fault Domain Isolations: When people are having a problem, understanding where to look."
"The Dynatrace support team that we have is great and the staff that we have had onsite has been consistently good."
"My primary use of the tool is to keep revenue coming into the business and to use it to help our business team in running their site analytics and web performance tools. They have things like Adobe Analytics that provide them with one layer of data. We use Dynatrace as another railroad metric to both confirm the Adobe Analytics data and enhance it in certain places where Adobe won't give us the answers that we need. In terms of metrics, we've had roughly about 120,000 unique sessions per hour on our website. So, we're capturing a lot of session data and real user data, and all of that data is kept in user sessions. We can look this information up by user ID to tag any given session that we want to find by date/client. E.g., if the user said that they had an issue last Thursday at 11:00 PM, then we can just do a search on their email address, go through all their sessions, and find the one that they mentioned, then dig directly into that one."
"The most valuable feature is the workflow, which helps you to easily have an overview of the infrastructure that you are analyzing, without having worked with it previously."
 

Cons

"My concern is with Automation integration."
"Dynatrace could be improved by having a fully functional applications and infrastructure monitoring feature."
"A tutorial could be embedded in the system as it is hard for a beginner to start using Dynatrace straight away."
"I would like to see more features from the desktop client included in the web client."
"It is not clear what are our long-term strategy should be to upgrade (Appmon vs Dynatrace)."
"It loses points in value because we’re not getting our money’s worth."
"The mobile app provided by Dynatrace could be improved, especially the DCR mobile app because it does not have some of the basic functions, like push notifications or even customized reports."
"We ran into a problem where the Dynatrace JavaScript agent is returning errors, and it's very apparent that there's a problem."
"The web interface, in some cases, is a little ambiguous to use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Licensing is very interesting, as you pay only for what is being monitored. A lot of things are given away for no additional cost. If you have a great IT consolidation, it will be pretty cheap. If you have a lot of servers, it will be heavier."
"They could improve their price ranges, as there is no option for startups or testing."
"The pricing is a little high, but still cheaper than competitors because Dynatrace at least has pay-as-you-go. Others do not. However, the pricing is confusing. I wish it was more simplified when trying to price out moving to a yearly contract."
"We have not fully been able to get the full value out of the product. It is expensive compared to other things that we have had in the past. Paying that much and not being able to get the full return on the product is a downgrade. ​"
"We are buying more licenses, because we are seeing more value."
"Price (of the product) is a major concern for all the clients I work with."
"We found an issue within the first week of ownership that has been costing us more than the entire license cost."
"The price range is quite high."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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.