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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
54th
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
260
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (6th), IT Operations Analytics (2nd), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Akamai mPulse is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Splunk AppDynamics is 3.7%, 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 AppDynamics3.7%
Akamai mPulse0.7%
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.
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

"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."
"Once you get past installation, AppDynamics is highly stable and we get good results."
"Splunk AppDynamics tells us what the top 10 queries are which are actually contributing to the load on the database, and it gives us the view of what exactly the query does, whether it uses more DB CPU or is contributing to the roll-up contention on the database."
"It has improved my organization because we are able to proactively and reactively look at performance issues."
"The best feature of AppDynamics is the analytics, which gives us the business insights of the application."
"The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is that you can easily determine the load on the application."
"The most valuable features of AppDynamics Database Monitoring are you can configure the performance and see in real-time what is exactly happening with the applications. Additionally, the dashboards are good."
"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."
"From the performance management side, I like everything from business transaction work to tracking. On the database side, we can get a lot of insights from the database. On the server monitoring side, it helped us a lot to find out some of the issues on the VM side because VMs were creating a little trouble for us."
 

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."
"An area for improvement in AppDynamics Server Monitoring is integration; in particular, it needs a better way to integrate with custom applications such as Siebel CRM. Right now, it's challenging to integrate AppDynamics Server Monitoring with Siebel CRM because it sometimes gives an error and cannot integrate properly."
"I have to use Splunk AppDynamics because the organization already implemented it. But my experience as an SME, subject matter expert on the APM tool, I would probably lean towards Datadog a little bit more than Splunk AppDynamics."
"AppDynamics Database Monitoring would be improved with more support for microservices architecture."
"I would like to see accommodation for millisecond granularity, as we only have one-second granularity now."
"The solution should add some monitoring similar to Oracle monitoring tools for databases. It has a lot of features to monitor SQL queries, and make some recommendation to resolve it. AppDynamics is just monitoring for delays and doesn't provide any recommendations for that. It's a deficiency."
"AppDynamics Server Monitoring has room for improvement in terms of pricing. If the price could be cheaper, it would be great for both the customer and the integrator. What I'd like to see in the next release of AppDynamics Server Monitoring is a better dashboard for the customer. The dashboard should be more interactive."
"There could log management features included in the product."
"One aspect that requires improvement is the agent. Without an agent, gathering sufficient information on applications is challenging."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"You are required to purchase licenses whether you use it or not. It is not pay-as-you-use."
"It could be a bit lower, but looking at the scalability, functionality, and other things, you can understand why AppDynamics is so expensive as compared to some of the cheaper products that don't have that full single pane of glass they've got. Dynatrace has got three different elements that you need to log into just to get a full view, which is not so good, and because of that, it is a bit cheaper."
"Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace was good."
"Pricing is based on the size of the deployment."
"It's a very expensive product. Each of the licenses after this month for one server is around $9,000 or $10,000."
"There is no standard license instead, the license is adapted to the organization's requirements."
"I would like more flexible pricing: A pay-per-use model, rather than just a fixed-price model."
"AppDynamics is what I would consider an enterprise-level solution. This means that it's a solution that is intended for use by larger organizations, while small or medium-sized businesses may find it difficult to afford. The number of agents required will also impact the pricing, and smaller companies may only be able to afford a limited number of agents. Essentially, the cost of the solution is not within the reach of every organization, and only some may be able to afford it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
10%
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 Enterprise195
 

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: February 2026.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.