Akamai mPulse vs Apica comparison

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Akamai mPulse

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Akamai mPulse and Apica are two robust products catering to performance monitoring and web optimization. Based on user reviews, Akamai mPulse is favored for its real user monitoring capabilities, whereas Apica is appreciated for its synthetic monitoring features, making it more suitable for proactive troubleshooting.

Features: Akamai mPulse offers detailed insights into real user interactions, granular data, and advanced alerts. Apica provides comprehensive synthetic monitoring, detailed scenario testing, and proactive performance checks. Users seem to prefer Apica's synthetic monitoring over Akamai mPulse's real user monitoring.

Room for Improvement: Users suggest Akamai mPulse could benefit from enhanced mobile app monitoring, a more intuitive reporting system, and better integration options. Apica could improve by refining its alert accuracy, offering more integration options, and simplifying its user interface. Apica’s need for integration improvement is noted frequently by users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Akamai mPulse offers a straightforward deployment process with excellent customer support, ensuring users can quickly start monitoring. Apica also provides smooth deployment and high-quality customer service, though some mention the initial setup can be complex. Akamai’s easy deployment is rated slightly higher.

Pricing and ROI: Akamai mPulse users find the pricing reasonable given the robust features and support, noting a good return on investment. Apica is seen as more expensive but offers valuable features that justify its cost, yielding a strong ROI. Despite Akamai’s cost-effectiveness, Apica’s pricing aligns well with its high feature set and effectiveness.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai mPulse vs. Apica Report (Updated: April 2025).

Akamai mPulse vs. Apica

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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

58th

Average Rating

6.6

Reviews Sentiment

5.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Apica

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

17th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (17th), IT Operations Analytics (5th), Observability Pipeline Software (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Akamai mPulse is 0.4%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Apica is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Arivu Arumugam

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.

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Noorul Mustafa Khan

Senior Associate Vice President at Wells Fargo

Validates content and perform login functionalities on front-end applications

First of all, it will depend on the type of application. If it's a web application, I would recommend implementing it in your lower environment first and checking for functionality. If you are satisfied, then push it to the higher environments. Apica has detected server-related issues and various web application-related issues promptly, alerting us in a timely manner. This allowed us to implement automation within our processes, ensuring comprehensive performance monitoring from failure detection to recovery. It was pretty easy to learn. I attended a couple of sessions with team members. They provided knowledge transfer, which took about a week. After that, I was able to onboard the company. However, for minor issues, I would still contact them. If you're a quick learner, it could take just a couple of weeks to get the hang of it. You can integrate Apica architect into your system because they provide APIs. With these APIs, you can utilize Apica where and when it's needed. For instance, you can create your own microservices to automate tasks or integrate it with tools like Postman. This flexibility allows you to embed Apica into various automation processes or any other functionalities you require. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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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."

"Enables dynamic injections from within the product which is great."

"It helps with releases because we monitor them in staging. We can tell if something is critically wrong before it gets into production, e.g., if it was load related or function related and also what was different in the dev stage. It then alerts us straightaway inside of our production monitors once it has been released. Therefore, it has improved how we run our systems since we monitor multiple environments."

"You can tell from the operational space of people who are using and consuming this data that they are more integrated. It is not dependent on one team anymore. It saves a lot of time by capturing and pinpointing the exact problem that is happening quickly. We have moved from getting escalations manually to getting escalations synthetically."

"There are several features that are really good. The first one is the flexibility and the advanced configuration that Apica offers when it comes to configuring synthetic checks. It provides the ability to customize how the check should be performed and it is very flexible in the number of synthetic locations that it can use. It allows us to run scripts from different locations all over the world, and they have a really good number of these locations."

"As always, within the IT industry, everybody's always looking to upgrade and update everything else like that. Apica has been one of those things but it's really hard to replace because it offers us the unique capability to see what the customer is seeing. A lot of other ones can do Selenium script and things like that, but there's a lot in Apica that we use right now. We utilize a lot of the scenario options in Apica right now, and there's a lot of other ones that do parts of it, but it doesn't do everything that Apica does."

"What I like the most is that Apica can simulate different browsers and different versions of desktop or mobile browsers."

"Our application SREs do script checks in such a way that closely mimic our customers' actions using the platform. Because there are so many different ways and options to be able to configure checks to closely mirror your applications' capabilities, it provides a lot of optionality for teams to create the right type of check that can notify when there are any issues. At the end of the day, we want our monitoring tools to be able to catch any outage before our customers do. This is where Apica Synthetic does a great job."

"The solution’s real-time monitoring features have had a huge impact on our service delivery."

"With the ZebraTester, the ability to have and store dynamic variables, when setting up the monitors, means you can extract that value and use it in a subsequent service call. This is something that has made our lives easier... This is one of the features that I like the most because it helps us in configuring these services, in a certain flow, without the need to re-record the whole thing."

More Apica pros

Cons

"In the next release, I would like to see the possibility of sharing the metric from this solution with other solutions."

"The end-to-end distributor tracing connectivity isn't there."

"If you are adding any input file, the tool fails to capture the path."

"Apica is costly, and there's no way to test mobile applications through Apica."

"The reporting part that we use for our executives needs a bit more customization capabilities. Right now, you can use only the three main templates for reporting. We would like to be able to customize them."

"We could use more detailed information in the request and response sections."

"Apica was a relatively new tool when I started using it. Although Apica had good documentation, it still felt less developed or advanced than a tool like LoadRunner."

"I have noticed that the tool isn't widely recognized outside our organization. Also, there aren't any tutorials or dedicated resources for this tool, making it challenging for newcomers to learn. It would be beneficial if someone experienced with it could provide guidance."

"The having to install an application on your desktop to utilize something like ZebraTester is a little cumbersome. It would be nice to see that become a web-based application. Having the documentation a little more accessible, and easier to digest by people who are just learning how to use the framework, especially when it comes to more complex or more edge-based cases would be really helpful to have."

"The accuracy of alerts can be improved a little bit. Right now, it's pretty good in terms of alerting pretty quickly about failures or changes in response times. However, what we have seen happen is the number of alerts that we are getting is very frequent, and we would like to tone down the number of alerts. That's the only trouble we have. Apica could tone down those settings because there is no option for us to tone it down to a level that would reduce the alerts to a minimum. As a platform, it does send us good alerts, but it could be improved a bit."

More Apica cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"The level of alerting accuracy has saved us time and money in operational costs. Overall, it has automated a lot of the manual efforts which have been more complex with some of our other scripting tools or monitors. So, it brings things together by doing things faster and saves us money."

"Another main difference between Apica and the other products was the cost. We really thought that the balance in Apica between the features and costs was the best among all the products on which we did a PoC."

"License management is another area that Apica could do better. We have already had these conversations with our account teams. This is something that they are looking at largely improving in upcoming releases. I believe that this is already on their roadmap."

"The solution's pricing is not cheap, but it is in the midrange."

"The pricing is fair. It is neither too cheap nor too expensive."

"I know Apica is an expensive solution, but it is worth the money for the service it provides."

"Apica is pretty cost-effective if you buy both solutions together: Synthetic and LoadTest. If you are going for one solution, the cost is on par with any tool in the market."

"The product is less expensive compared to LoadRunner."

More Apica pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Financial Services Firm

34%

Computer Software Company

11%

Media Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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Earn 20 points

What do you like most about Apica Synthetic?

The GUI is powerful and doesn't require scripting or regular expressions. It has a vast finder for correlation, which is easier than other tools like JMeter and LoadRunner. It's also easy to integr...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apica Synthetic?

I know Apica is an expensive solution, but it is worth the money for the service it provides.

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What needs improvement with Apica Synthetic?

Apica cannot perform endurance or scale-up tests independently. It requires other tools like ALM. When editing scripts, only one can be accessed at a time, risking changes affecting other folders. ...

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Compared 14% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs Akamai mPulse

Compared 9% of the time

Splunk Observability Cloud vs Akamai mPulse

Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 24% of the time

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Compared 20% of the time

Cribl vs Apica

Compared 17% of the time

AlertSite vs Apica

Compared 13% of the time

Grafana vs Apica

Compared 13% of the time

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Product Reports

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Download Akamai mPulse product report

Download Apica product report

Also Known As

SOASTA mPulse

Apica LoadTest, Apica Synthetic

Overview

Akamai mPulse is a real user monitoring (RUM) solution that gives performance engineers, administrators, and developers the ability to effortlessly visualize website functionality issues and identify ways to improve processes that conventional testing protocols do not find. mPulse gives users usable scenarios to better understand how processes such as user interactions, visual progress, and third-party resources may be disrupting the overall user experience and application delivery.

mPulse enables users to take a deep dive into the specific performance issues and complete comprehensive error analyses, to thoroughly understand the effect on critical user interactions such as conversions, page views, and more.

mPulse gathers and delivers data on an organization's website’s performance and metrics on user web browsing experiences. The mPulse feature “Boomerang” is a JavaScript Library that monitors the website page load time. Boomerang has a unique plugin architecture and works with all websites. The Boomerang feature is embedded on each page of an organization's website.

mPulse works seamlessly with Akamai solution Ion, so the RUM data can be instantly gathered once the Luna Control Center has been activated. Ion instantly attaches Boomerang to the organization’s web properties; there is no need to change the website code.

Akamai mPulse Benefits

Third-party monitoring: mPulse enables users to effortlessly monitor and visualize the effect that third-party vendors, resources, and scripts may have on the organization’s web properties.
Real-time intuitions: RUM data is continually being gathered, so users are able to instantly experience changes in user performance during every critical event. Users are able to respond immediately and make corrections or amendments as needed. Additionally, mPulse integrates effectively with other third-party notification solutions, such as Slack, PagerDuty, and webhook API support.
Framework integrations: mPulse integrates with many of today’s popular single-page application (SPA) frameworks, such as React.js, Backbone.js, Angular.js, Ember.js, and even some custom frameworks. mPulse has the ability to also be seamlessly integrated in Non-SPA websites.
Intuitive feedback: mPulse gathers data and creates workable solutions so users have a better understanding of how objects, images, or even entire pages are affecting user behavior. Users can gather numerous metrics (custom or advanced) to achieve a better, more complete understanding of ways to improve the user experience with the application or website.
Custom metrics and timers: With mPulse, users can effortlessly create custom timers to discover important performance sessions unique to the application. The mPulse dashboard allows users to set up trackers for numerous metrics, such as:
- First image load time
- Sidebar load time
- Page load times
- Third-party resource content load time
mPulse Beacon API: This valuable benefit allows users to send custom metrics from mobile and web applications to mPulse. This gives mPulse greater flexibility and usability to frameworks and platforms that can make HTTP calls. Representational State Transfer (REST) interface is included and is able to be used by any web application using any language running on the platform. There is also a Beacon API library for JavaScript. This option is available from the dashboard by creating a new application and an API key.

Akamai

Apica offers a unified platform to remove complexity and cost associated with data management. You collect, control, store, and observe your data and can quickly identify and resolve performance issues before they impact the end-user. Apica Ascent swiftly analyzes telemetry data in real-time, enabling prompt issue resolution, while automated root cause analysis, powered by machine learning, streamlines troubleshooting in complex distributed systems. The platform simplifies data collection by automating and managing agents through the platform’s Fleet product. Its Flow product simplifies and optimizes pipeline control with AI and ML to help you easily understand complex workflows. Its Store component allows you to never run out of storage space while you index and store machine data centrally on one platform and reduce costs, and remediate faster. Observe offers modern observability data management, helping you with MELT data, effortless dashboarding, and seamless integration of synthetic and real data.

Experience the Apica Ascent Platform

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

HBO, JPMC, Morgan Stanley, Xander, EA Sports, Volvo

Akamai mPulse vs. Apica