Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Akamai mPulse vs Splunk AppDynamics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

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
55th
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Splunk AppDynamics
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
264
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (6th), IT Operations Analytics (2nd), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Akamai mPulse is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk AppDynamics is 3.8%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Splunk AppDynamics3.8%
Akamai mPulse0.6%
Other95.6%
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.
Shamim Alsharif - PeerSpot reviewer
Performance Test Engineer at TANIM CONSULTING, LLC
Real-time monitoring has improved our banking API performance and supports detailed business transaction analysis
The real-time monitoring is what we can see for anything that is needed in terms of CPU, memory, or the connections or the sessions related. It's real-time monitoring of performance of each of the components, which is what we need and use all the time. It's highly effective, I would say. Infrastructure visibility, transaction monitoring, to check the actual user experience in terms of the response time, MRT and all those things. We do the component monitoring like the API performance and the connections and all those things, but we also do the business process monitoring and business transaction monitoring.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"There's a good relationship between the price and the licences."
"Enables dynamic injections from within the product which is great."
"It provides a great overview for management regarding user experience."
"The most valuable feature is the solutions overall performance. It is very efficient and accurate for our usage."
"It provides real-time monitoring for performance and availability of specific portions of the website without a significant data overhead."
"It’s a very good product for performance tracking, I haven’t used many others, so I can’t comment on a competitive level."
"The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is its ability to track the transactions between different applications."
"The solution helps us with performance testing by enabling us to monitor applications."
"AppDynamics makes it very clear when and where the issue is occurring and it makes us quickly find and solve the root of the problem, helping us foster more trust in our teams and the applications those teams build because everyone is being monitored by the same application."
"The product provides a nice end-user experience."
"The features, ease of use, and customer service provided by AppDynamics was what tipped the scale towards them."
"The features related to the application performance in AppDynamics Database Monitoring are the most valuable."
"The metrics browser is very useful, and the deep dive feature is very useful for us."
"AppDynamics has become the go-to tool for issue identification."
 

Cons

"It needs a more intuitive GUI and more customization options."
"Scalability to larger volume of data seems to be hit or miss."
"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."
"In the next release, I would like to see the possibility of sharing the metric from this solution with other solutions."
"Yes, the custom dashboard. Making custom dashboards is really tedious. I wish there was just a drag and drop to slap things together quickly."
"Its resiliency can be improved. We're told that the best we can do with an on-prem solution is to have a hot standby that requires a manual switchover. So, it is a do-it-yourself Ikea model of maintaining data consistency between two servers, without having low balance or failover considerations for an on-prem solution."
"AppDynamics Server Monitoring lacks investment in new technologies like Kubernetes and cloud solutions."
"AppD is really cool and a unified solution for both APM and APM centric Analytics side. We can show almost all business data within the APM context from the end-user perspetive. But this process is a little bit manual. If they catch and map business journeys based on customer interaction on the browser automatically, it should be really fine."
"They should combine the cloud and EPM on-premises together and provide a unified single pane of glass for all their modules because they currently have different modules for infrastructure monitoring."
"The solution could be more user-friendly for diagnostic purposes. Anyone who is using the solution should be able to infer what that error is about, they should be able to troubleshoot it better."
"Unfortunately, the setup is quite expensive, which is the bad part of it because I want to spread my agent across the IT landscape, but that's very expensive."
"Splunk AppDynamics does not support the complete MELT framework, which includes metrics, events, logging, and tracing for the entire stack. It lacks maturity in correlation within the observability spectrum."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"This solution is not the cheapest but it works well. You will end up doing more work with a cheaper solution than if you just spent the extra money on a better solution like this one."
"Pricing is based on the size of the deployment."
"There were no added costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"The price of AppDynamics could be reduced in my region."
"AppDynamics is priced on the higher side."
"We have purchased a few licenses for AppDynamics Database Monitoring and the price is high."
"AppDynamics does not usually do monthly payments. They do it on an annual basis, at the very least."
"Yearly payments have to be made toward the licensing costs of the solution. The solution has no additional costs apart from the licensing costs."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business56
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise198
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AppDynamics?
I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten. The solution is highly expensive. Our company pays for the solution on a yearly basis, if we don't add new modules or features to the license, we need ...
 

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
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai mPulse vs. Splunk AppDynamics and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.