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Akamai mPulse vs Instana Dynamic APM comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

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
62nd
Average Rating
6.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Instana Dynamic APM
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
50th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Akamai mPulse is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Instana Dynamic APM is 0.9%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Instana Dynamic APM0.9%
Akamai mPulse0.6%
Other98.5%
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.
Muhammad Jawwad Hassan - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at Arcana Info
A really good GUI that is easy for non-technical users to understand
Our company uses the solution for one of our bank clients. We use App Connect middleware to monitor services and applications such as Docker, Kubernetes, MongoDB, and MS SQL Server. We also monitor the bottleneck for all servers.  We currently have 20 users at one of our branches. We plan to expand…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It provides a great overview for management regarding user experience."
"We are a worldwide company and we need to have a solution with good performance which the solution is providing us with; it has helped our company."
"The most valuable feature is the solutions overall performance. It is very efficient and accurate for our usage."
"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."
"It provides real-time monitoring for performance and availability of specific portions of the website without a significant data overhead."
"It’s a very good product for performance tracking, I haven’t used many others, so I can’t comment on a competitive level."
"Enables dynamic injections from within the product which is great."
"There's a good relationship between the price and the licences."
"With Instana, the interface and the UI are very simple to use."
"Sometimes it's able to provide a proper RCA on its own. It's able to correlate different events that occurred and that becomes like an RCA in itself."
"If a key monitored value has crossed a threshold, it sends out an alert. And the solution is able to intelligently find out if something is beyond the range that it normally resides in."
"The most valuable features are the monitoring with granularity by one second, which allows real-time data generation, and the fast implementation."
"It's a good tool to implement across the board if you can make it into your images or as part of your configuration management tool."
"It is user-friendly, but we encounter issues processing input and understanding the graphics, such as seeing a flatline without knowing the cause. When these problems occur, I have to contact my support team to address and fix them. Also, monitoring processing is good."
"Its GUI is really good and it easy to understand for non-technical users."
"Instana is very fast to implement and deploy because the dashboards are automated and don't need configuration."
 

Cons

"The end-to-end distributor tracing connectivity isn't there."
"It needs a more intuitive GUI and more customization options."
"The solution didn't help us much and that's the reason we never used mPulse on a full scale and why we chose to go with Dynatrace."
"They work very well, only thing is they need more time to improve and fix all the issues."
"In the next release, I would like to see the possibility of sharing the metric from this solution with other solutions."
"Scalability to larger volume of data seems to be hit or miss."
"The API monitoring aspect could be better."
"Its SLI and SLA features need improvement in setting up alerts."
"New Relic has a better UI in terms of how it presents the data."
"The integration could be improved with more plugins or open API."
"I think that Instana should improve the university and the certification process, so the users can find experts in Instana with their certification module process."
"We'd always like to see additional functionalities."
"Maybe log monitoring could be better."
"The configuration of Instana Dynamic APM needs improvement because it requires quite a bit of work."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Pricing is quite competitive. Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic were all several times more expensive than Instana, both the on-prem and the SaaS versions. Price-wise they are a lot more competitive than anyone else out there."
"Instana Dynamic APM is more affordable for small and medium-sized companies compared to other vendors."
"Its pricing isn't a big pain point. Its pricing seems to be better than some of the other competing products in the market, but they also have some of the features and functionalities that are better than Instana."
"The pricing is $1,200 per year which is a bit high compared to other vendors."
"It's reasonably priced and manageable, especially for individuals who grasp the significance of application monitoring."
"The solution is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"The solution's pricing is comparable to other products."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise5
 

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
Daxko Lifts Fitness Studios Through COVID Regulations with Quick Engineering PivotsAltissia Meets SLAs to Support Student DeadlinesImmocloud Unlocks Observability to Modernize Real EstateEnento Group Boosts Service Reliability with Real-Time Visibility into Application Performance Instana’s Observability for Amazon EKS Helps Yara Deliver Digital Farming Solutions
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai mPulse vs. Instana Dynamic APM and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
912,565 professionals have used our research since 2012.