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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."
"Since we have been receiving alerts from Dynatrace, we go ahead and fix them without the user knowing about them."
"It is very stable and reliable."
"The User experience monitor is a real added value."
"It simplifies a lot of the processes of performance tuning client systems before they go live."
"We are able to fix issues rather quickly, by identifying then fixing them. Therefore, the efficiency of the organization has improved. We are spending less time fixing issues."
"Before we had the tool we had no visibility into the user experience and capturing what was going on inside the browser. We utilized tags so we knew how many times people were doing certain things, but we did not know how the performance was, if users were satisfied with what they were doing, and if we were serving up errors."
"No other provider gives us log ingestion, Kubernetes/Docker monitoring, and application monitoring for NodeJS."
"The ability to really drill into performance issues and help our application teams understand what is causing the business's problems."
 

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."
"They expect the customer to do the basic analysis, do all the solutions, and find the solutions themselves. If it is really a product problem, only then will they be able to identify and spend time on the customer."
"There is still a bit of redundancy in Dynatrace."
"There are lots of features to share information, but we need to learn to leverage that, both on the web browser and on the mobile app."
"Network monitoring is lacking and could be improved."
"I would like to see AppMon also integrated in the Dynatrace portal. There are certain features, which I am not saying are not there in Dynatrace, but I am used to in AppMon."
"Improvements are needed in the navigation and timeframe selection when browsing problems."
"The dashboard could improve."
"Right now, there is a log analysis feature. This is maybe a little more deeper than the log analytics in comparison to other tools, like Splunk or Sumo Logic. If Dynatrace can come up with this replay feature, that would be great."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The licensing model is confusing in solutioning clients for the number of hosts needed to deploy."
"Dynatrace is bit costly and not easily affordable."
"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."
"Pricing is still too expensive."
"I feel the price is good for what the product does."
"​A Dynatrace partner will always be willing to give you a trial. Go through the trial to see if there is a benefit for your company."
"If there are no corporate requirements to run Dynatrace Managed (operating it yourself), I would definitely go for the size option. For small and medium-sized companies, the size option is probably the cheapest one. You don't need to look into operating it. You don't need to run hardware. It is pay as you go."
"You get a really well-planned out monitoring suite for the money spent."
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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

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

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.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.