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 Nov 23, 2025

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
53rd
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
6.7
Number of Reviews
259
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (6th), IT Operations Analytics (2nd), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 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 3.6%, down from 5.3% 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 (%)
Splunk AppDynamics3.6%
Akamai mPulse0.6%
Other95.8%
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.
DK
Technology lead at Infosys
Has enabled us to detect issues instantly through alerts and monitor every service from a single dashboard
Splunk requires significantly more improvements compared to Splunk AppDynamics, specifically regarding the licensing aspect. Splunk renews licenses every six months, which is inconvenient. It would be better to have a one-year license to avoid needing to update keys constantly, which can only occur on weekends, making it a burdensome task. Although Splunk is better for certain use cases, Splunk AppDynamics is broader in functionality. Specifically, I want enhancements related to creating dashboards not only for logs or minor services but also for configuration levels, allowing us to check configurations immediately without manually opening the entire code when exceptions arise—a feature I wish to see improved in Splunk, although it may not be necessary for Splunk AppDynamics.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Enables dynamic injections from within the product which is great."
"The most valuable feature is the solutions overall performance. It is very efficient and accurate for our usage."
"Applications: This provides us insight into how our applications are performing within our environments and affords us the ability to identify opportunities and make changes to code / environment to effect positive performance lift."
"Visibility to the end-users is a valuable feature."
"The real user monitoring and digital experience monitoring effectively track actual user experience with the applications, including page loading, interaction time for both desktop and mobile applications."
"The most valuable features of Splunk AppDynamics that I have found so far include it being a deep-in monitoring solution for applications such as Java and databases, where you can dig into the log information and performance information that is within the application, and for a very easy setup, you have all the information that you need."
"We're a large organization, so we appreciate AppDynamics' wide coverage. It may not work in all areas, but it has broad coverage. We can use the same dataset for different use case aspects. That is the beauty of AppDynamics. You can coordinate APM, EUM, and infrastructure through one dataset."
"It's good for a larger scale deployment such as what my company is working on."
"We have seen application availability increase, and there is a twenty-five percent reduction of the application downtime."
"The most valuable feature is the detailed statistics, like the consumer count, for the ActiveMQ server."
 

Cons

"The end-to-end distributor tracing connectivity isn't there."
"In the next release, I would like to see the possibility of sharing the metric from this solution with other solutions."
"The solution needs to support IBM products."
"AppDynamics scaled well up to around 3,000 agents. The performance deteriorated after that, while Dynatrace could support more than 10,000 agents. We were surprised that AppDynamics' scalability is not so good."
"If it can be able to intelligently provide all the things we need to look at, from a data point of view, that would be very useful."
"The challenge in the installation is that you have to configure a lot of things manually. The way you install and configure it is not straightforward."
"The initial setup could be easier."
"The solution could improve the server size for AppDynamics to include middleware products, which is doesn't yet cover. If they add middleware for sophisticated sites, AppDynamics would be the global choice."
"Splunk AppDynamics provides an end-to-end view of the application but misses the infrastructure part, which is crucial."
"They are using Flash for their website, which is very slow. We had hoped the website would be much faster to use, and that is definitely what we want to see."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The licensing cost is fairly high"
"The pricing of the solution is reasonable for what features you receive."
"We are looking forward to purchasing the solution on the AWS Marketplace."
"I believe there was probably an extra charge whenever I wanted to contact the support team."
"The licensing scheme is very complex. They need to make it easier."
"There were no added costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"The pricing is quite comparable to similar solutions in the market. All these solutions at the moment are cheap, but it is like paying for insurance; you pay insurance to avoid major damage."
"We have two different licensing models for this solution. One of them is the agent based model, which requires payment per agent. The other is an infrastructure based model, where the price is based on the CPU core. For the infrastructure model wholesale level pricing applies. All of the up to date licensing prices for this product are available on the manufacturers website."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing 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 Business55
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise194
 

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: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.