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

Akamai mPulse vs Grafana 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

Akamai mPulse
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
57th
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Grafana
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Akamai mPulse is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Grafana is 2.7%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Grafana2.7%
Akamai mPulse0.6%
Other96.7%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Arivu Arumugam - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Lacking in regard to observation of the entire platform but does dynamic injections from within
There is little that's unique about mPulse but since the solution is part of Akamai, you can do dynamic injections from within the product which is a great feature. the UI is quite good. It offers a basic set of features but nothing unique other than that as part of Akamai, you can do dynamic injections.
BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Unified dashboards have empowered teams and have democratized real-time operational insights
Grafana's snapshot and dashboard sharing features are critical for our remote incident response. During production issues, I generate a public snapshot of a dashboard at a specific point and share the URL in our Slack war room so every engineer can see exactly what the metrics looked like when the error occurred. This helps significantly during the process of finding the root cause in those scenarios. The best features Grafana offers go beyond just pretty charts; it is an integration engine. The fact that I can join data from my SQL database with metrics from Prometheus in the same table is a feature I have not found performed as well elsewhere. My team uses this feature by comparing two different tables from the databases to show one single view, which Grafana is really helping with. In a visualized way, the charts can be displayed on one dashboard, allowing end users who are not familiar with these technical aspects to extract valuable data from it. Grafana has positively impacted our organization by democratizing data within our company. Before using Grafana, only developers could see the system health, but now our product managers and executives have their own high-level dashboards, which has improved cross-departmental transparency and alignment.

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 feature is the solutions overall performance. It is very efficient and accurate for our usage."
"There's a good relationship between the price and the licences."
"There is little that's unique about mPulse but since the solution is part of Akamai, you can do dynamic injections from within the product which is a great feature."
"It’s a very good product for performance tracking, I haven’t used many others, so I can’t comment on a competitive level."
"We are a worldwide company and we need to have a solution with good performance which the solution is providing us with; it has helped our company."
"It provides a great overview for management regarding user experience."
"It provides real-time monitoring for performance and availability of specific portions of the website without a significant data overhead."
"Enables dynamic injections from within the product which is great."
"The best feature was the creation of graphs and trends."
"The integration between Loki and Tempo is valuable."
"The installation process is easy. We have deployed it on the cloud. I have around 20 to 30 people using the solution in my company."
"What I found most valuable in Grafana is that it has a lot of integrations and features that I need for data processing and visualization."
"We can write queries in different languages, which is beneficial for visualization."
"​Grafana has improved our analysis capability to solve an issue, increasing the co-working between IT services and business services.​"
"The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability."
"Almost any kind of visualization is possible with Grafana and all dashboards are configurable."
 

Cons

"In the next release, I would like to see the possibility of sharing the metric from this solution with other solutions."
"It needs a more intuitive GUI and more customization options."
"The solution didn't help us much and that's the reason we never used mPulse on a full scale and why we chose to go with Dynatrace."
"The end-to-end distributor tracing connectivity isn't there."
"They work very well, only thing is they need more time to improve and fix all the issues."
"Scalability to larger volume of data seems to be hit or miss."
"It would be helpful if Grafana provided more information and training on how to use Prometheus."
"The solution should include online support."
"The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
"The look and feel of the charting and graph capabilities in Grafana could improve."
"Multiple dashboards combined into one dashboard has slowed things down for us."
"We need different kinds of applications in our infrastructure to see information in Grafana."
"Trigger limits are difficult to see in a graph."
"The product could be improved with a feature that provides detailed error messages when we encounter issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"​Grafana is free and open source.​"
"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."
"We are using the open-source license."
"You need to purchase the solution's license for its commercial use."
"I am using an open-source version"
"I use the open source model so it is free."
"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."
"For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise25
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Grafana?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is very reasonable and has excellent community support.
What needs improvement with Grafana?
Currently, I do not think that any improvement is required, but there are multiple use cases.
What is your primary use case for Grafana?
My main use case for Grafana is to create and design dashboards based on the metrics provided by different exporters via Prometheus. We have different exporters, and we are creating different dashb...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SOASTA mPulse
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nordstrom, Gatwick, DirecTV, MSN, SquareSpace, SAP, Lenovo, Hallmark, myspace, Intuit, Kentucky Derby, Toys "R" Us, Netflix, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Lowe's, Nike, REI, Apple, Sears, Verizon, Wendy's, Huawei
Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai mPulse vs. Grafana and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.