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Apache SkyWalking vs Dynatrace comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Apache SkyWalking
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
52nd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Dynatrace
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
358
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (6th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Apache SkyWalking is 0.7%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 6.6%, down from 11.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Dynatrace6.6%
Apache SkyWalking0.7%
Other92.7%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2784462 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Tracing has revealed hybrid bottlenecks and delivers full visibility into critical payment flows
Apache SkyWalking provided full visibility into the black hole because before using it, we could not see what was happening when a request left Amazon EKS and went to our on-premises legacy databases. Apache SkyWalking's distributed tracing correlates these two worlds in a single view, showing us that 40% of the latency was actually happening in the network hop between the cloud and the physical data center, not in the code itself. Second, it exposes hidden architectural flaws. By using the automatic dependency mapping, we discovered that some microservices were stuck in a cyclic dependency which was documented nowhere. This visual evidence allowed us to refactor the logic and immediately increased our throughput by 30%. Apache SkyWalking gave us database-level insight without database access. Through its slow query monitoring, the Java agents captured the exact SQL statements that were hanging during peak sales hours. This meant our developers could fix the exact line of code or index without needing to wait for a DBA to pull logs, reducing our mean time to resolution. There are many features that are useful to mention in this case because we obtained different benefits. Apache SkyWalking automatically drew the topology of the 600 pods where we discovered cyclic dependencies between services that no one had documented before and that were slowing down the system. Another valuable feature is resolving hybrid bottlenecks because we isolated a specific network issue between AWS and the physical data center. Without distributed tracing, infrastructure teams blame Java code and vice versa. Database tuning is also important because thanks to slow query metrics captured by the agent, we identified and rewrote the SQL queries that most impacted performance during sales peaks.
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

"Apache SkyWalking is a very nice tool and an exceptional tool for managing volume and complex architecture on AWS without the prohibitive cost of commercial suites."
"The most valuable feature is the beautiful UI."
"The speed and problem resolution."
"Finally, we have 100% visibility on website performance, including third-party sources."
"The ability to real-time monitor servers and databases without any major drain on application resources is invaluable."
"We have used PurePath data (response times) to improve and tune application performance."
"The User Sessions Query language has definitely been the most helpful with its key user actions and user session properties. Using those together, that has completely transformed how we're able to identify customers and their problems on our site. It has made a very big impact over the year."
"The real-user monitoring is mostly used to gauge the difference in performance for multitenant applications, This is so we can discern if there are any local network or client-facing issues when we do a comparison between each customer. It is quite important for us to be able to identify a client-side issue, as opposed to a feature managed problem, because we're essentially providing managed services of business applications."
"You don't have to configure it. It just needs to be installed."
 

Cons

"Apache SkyWalking can be improved with storage management complexity because with this volume of 50 million traces a day, managing data retention on OpenSearch is critical."
"One thing that would help it tighter integration with DCRUM. It's somewhat difficult to drill down and see everything, but I think that's in the future versions. We just haven't seen that yet."
"Custom reporting capabilities should be extended, because it now has basic charting capabilities."
"I'd really like to see more dashboarding abilities. The ability to do workflows within dashboards, being able to start at a high level and click into it with custom dashboards. I think most of the time, we are creating our own custom dashboards, and I'd just like to see more ability with that."
"It needs more dashboards like AppMon."
"Every time I want to see the PurePath, I have to launch the client. It would be helpful if they introduced this in the browser application."
"We would like the AI to produce more scientific data with less configuration."
"Where we are struggling is being able to pull that information out and combine it with other contextual information that we have in other sources. Mining that data in a big-data environment, and joining it together and coming up with larger types of analysis on it."
"If there was something that could be done at a local developer's station, something like, "Hey, here's a hint, this thing looks like it might not be optimized," or the like. I think more development features, to hedge that performance would be good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"You get a really well-planned out monitoring suite for the money spent."
"Getting the first agents installed, getting information, and coverage in a initial set of systems can be done in hours and with a low cost entry point."
"They could improve their price ranges, as there is no option for startups or testing."
"Time to value was surprisingly fast."
"Always gives good ROI and total cost of ownership."
"Product pricing can seem a little over complex, however this is minor and does not detract from the benefits of the solution."
"There is a license issue where if we increase the memory we have to up the licenses. I was unaware of that going in. I thought it was scalable without all the paperwork behind the scenes. ​​"
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
11%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business78
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise298
 

Questions from the Community

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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

1. Alibaba 2. Amazon 3. Apple 4. Baidu 5. ByteDance 6. Cisco 7. Dell 8. Google 9. Huawei 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JPMorgan Chase 13. Klarna 14. LinkedIn 15. Microsoft 16. Netflix 17. Oracle 18. PayPal 19. Pinterest 20. Qualcomm 21. SAP 22. Samsung 23. Spotify 24. Tencent 25. Twitter 26. Uber 27. VMware 28. WeChat 29. Xiaomi 30. Zoom
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 Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: January 2026.
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