AppDynamics vs Dynatrace comparison

AppDynamics and Dynatrace are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. AppDynamics is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.2, while Dynatrace is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.3. AppDynamics holds a 5.4% mindshare in APM, compared to Dynatrace’s 12.7% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of AppDynamics users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Dynatrace users who would recommend it.

AppDynamics

Read 156 AppDynamics reviews

15,054 Views
9,654 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Dynatrace

Read 344 Dynatrace reviews

36,984 Views
22,428 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

AppDynamics

Dynatrace

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Dynatrace and AppDynamics compete in the application performance management solutions category. Dynatrace generally scores higher due to its automation and AI capabilities, while AppDynamics is often praised for its deeper application insights and business transaction monitoring.

What features are offered by Dynatrace in comparison to AppDynamics?

Dynatrace is recognized for its automatic full-stack monitoring, AI-based problem detection, and robust automation features. AppDynamics offers detailed business transaction monitoring, end-to-end performance insights, and comprehensive application dashboards.

What areas of improvement can be found in Dynatrace in comparison to AppDynamics?

Dynatrace could improve its complex pricing structure, reduce heavy resource usage, and provide more flexible deployment options. AppDynamics users highlight the need for better Kubernetes support, simpler configuration processes, and enhanced reporting features.

How is the ease of deployment and customer service of Dynatrace in comparison to AppDynamics?

Dynatrace has straightforward deployment and responsive customer support. AppDynamics also provides good deployment options but can be complex initially. Both companies receive positive reviews for customer service, with a slight preference for Dynatrace.

What setup costs and ROI can be seen with Dynatrace in comparison to AppDynamics?

Dynatrace is criticized for its high setup costs but offers significant ROI due to its features and problem resolution capabilities. AppDynamics users report good ROI from detailed transaction monitoring despite high setup costs. Dynatrace offers more immediate cost justification, while AppDynamics is valued for long-term insights.

To learn more, read our detailed AppDynamics vs. Dynatrace Report (Updated: November 2024).

Buyer's Guide

AppDynamics vs. Dynatrace

November 2024

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Categories and Ranking

AppDynamics

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

5th

Ranking in Mobile APM

3rd

Ranking in Container Monitoring

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Number of Reviews

156

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Dynatrace

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

2nd

Ranking in Mobile APM

1st

Ranking in Container Monitoring

2nd

Average Rating

8.8

Number of Reviews

344

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (4th), AIOps (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AppDynamics is 5.4%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 12.7%, down from 14.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Q&A Highlights

reviewer1555236

IT Operations Executive at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Jun 29, 2021

What are pros and cons of AppDynamics vs Dynatrace?

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 monitoring. We maintain critical processing on our mainframe so there was a desire to include this in our transaction trace. Due to a highly mature ELK implementation, we are not trying to incorporate log analytics into solution buy may consider in the future. We had AppD, Dynatrace, New Relic, and CA Wily all in house at the time of our evaluation. We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing. Between Dynatrace and New Relic, Dynatrace won based on the automation, integrated AI, support for "old" techs, and confidence we could eliminate multiple APM and infra monitoring tools. I would not include products like BigPanda, MoogSoft, in this analysis. They are not monitoring solutions but event correlation solutions. You will need additional monitoring products to capture data and feed them. Having said that if you cannot consolidate tools you will likely need to purchase an event solution to make sense of all the alarms. We did evaluate these products but with Dynatrace AI did not feel the business value was there for the investment. Here's a quick pro/con list on Dynatrace & New Relic from our analysis. New Relic Pros: Insights is an awesome product and capability. Lots of capabilities and plugins to extend data collection. The APM dashboard is aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. Good training and documentation are available to support the product. New Relic Cons: Requires lots of manual configurations to implement and support. Insights product requires an investment of time to achieve value. Licensing is a nightmare as there is virtually no transparency in what you are being charged for. Lack of solution to consolidate alerts across implementation other than significant investment in insights to manually achieve this. Dynatrace Pros: Very simple to implement and maintain with out of the box automation which supports modern (cloud/Kubernetes) and "old" (mainframe). In-app chat is helpful. High integration of infra and APM data for full-stack observability and engineering. Topology and trace discovery is more reliable than other products or our CMDB. Synthetics are easy to set up for any user. AI-assisted problem analysis on the trace discovery streamlines troubleshooting. AI includes "events" in an analysis like VMotion, deployment events. Have not done yet but looking to leverage monitoring as code for a fully integrated and automated delivery pipeline. See keptn.sh open source project. Dynatrace Cons: User SQL lacks some functions of NRQL for user analysis. Host, process, and service data is not available to query within the product. Alarm processing lacks some granular controls. The Plug-in library is less robust. Good luck with your decision!

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Featured Reviews

Venus Yaker Dalton

Information Technology Specialist at 3M

Oct 5, 2023

Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping

As for areas of improvement, AppDynamics could benefit from greater integration with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. This would allow the tool to automatically analyze and correlate application performance and behavior data to detect patterns and anomalies not evident to users. Additionally, the ability to track performance in multi-cloud environments would be valuable as many organizations are adopting hybrid cloud or multi-cloud strategies. In terms of additional features, it would be beneficial to include a capacity management module that allows operations teams to proactively plan and adjust capacity, avoiding performance issues related to lack of resources.

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Sathis-Kumar

Senior Manager at Bank of America

Nov 29, 2022

The single-agent format is easy to use and accurately captures issues

Our company uses the solution to identify performance issues. Our database is in Oracle and our user interface is Maps. The solution helps us to gather required information and manage systems. For example, we just had a big data center issue with cluster settings, voting, and updating. The…

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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

"Capacity planning is, in my opinion, the most useful."

"The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is that you can easily determine the load on the application."

"The transaction snapshots are the most valuable feature of AppDynamics"

"The flow map is very valuable to us. Before we installed APM, we had no idea how our application looked."

"AppDynamics' best feature is automation - for example, when I add a note, it can understand the data automatically."

"The best features of AppDynamics would be the code application monitoring capabilities."

"It's good for a larger scale deployment such as what my company is working on."

"AppDynamics is scalable."

More AppDynamics pros

"Service engineers save a lot of time because they can just go in look at the data and share it with the customer, who has the same view, and say, "Here's an improvement which can be immediately implemented." It's not like a collection of big, multiple findings that are consolidated into one results presentation, then the customer needs to do something. It's more like a continuous performance analysis and improvement process, which is more efficient than those workshops approaches. That's one of the biggest of the advantages that our services team sees because it helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production."

"The User Sessions Query language has definitely been the most helpful with its key user actions and user session properties. Using those together, that has completely transformed how we're able to identify customers and their problems on our site. It has made a very big impact over the year."

"We have not had any stability issues with it at all. This has been the most stable solution that I have worked with."

"We are able to get insights into our systems, which previously took us weeks to be able to detect."

"The ability to create any dashboard that you want for different levels of reporting for technical people, managers, or even executive level. They can get a one page view of what the system health and performance looks like."

"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of application performance."

"No one else works with security gateways. I am able to configure those perfectly well within the banking and FDIC infrastructure to pass audits."

"It was delivered when we wanted it and has performed exceptionally well."

More Dynatrace pros

Cons

"I would like them to change their business model for scalability to accommodate growing companies. The business model should be more flexible."

"AppDynamics lacks integration with cloud technology. It probably isn't a good fit for emerging enterprises because it's an on-premise solution, and many newer companies are moving to the cloud. AppDynamics' on-premise technology works reasonably well, but it doesn't have cloud features."

"AppDynamics's agent management could be improved."

"Their agents sometimes claim to be very lightweight, especially with databases, but they are very heavy. They can take up more compute than the actual work that we need to do."

"I would like to be able to monitor both cloud an on-prem infrastructures, displayed in one dashboard."

"While it is scalable, it could be better."

"The agent deployment could be simplified by, for example, adding a GUI."

"We constantly need to improve our alert mechanism because we get a lot of false-positive alerts. These are not real errors. In addition, for end-user monitoring, sometimes, we are not able to catch all user activities. Because of not being able to follow the user activity from the start to the end, we are missing out on the performance issues."

More AppDynamics cons

"We called support mostly about implementation issues. Docker was one which was early on and the support structure for Dynatrace. Typically, they were trying to help us figure out third-party applications and where the monitoring agent should be located."

"I am unable to use Synthetic to automate user login."

"I'd really like to see more dashboarding abilities. The ability to do workflows within dashboards, being able to start at a high level and click into it with custom dashboards. I think most of the time, we are creating our own custom dashboards, and I'd just like to see more ability with that."

"I was hands on in the setup of the solution. Initially, it seemed a little daunting."

"This solution would be improved with the addition of annotations for automated custom metrics creation."

"Needs more compatibility of platforms out-of-the-box."

"On the one hand we have Dynatrace, on the other hand, we have AppMon. We know Dynatrace is more powerful, with a lot of functions, but there are some core functions AppMon has that Dynatrace needs. Our main use is AppMon and we have not gone to Dynatrace because we don't have those specific functions that we need."

"I would like to see the ability to pull more user-friendly reports."

More Dynatrace cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AppDynamics is one of the most expensive solutions on the market."

"Purchasing the product through the AWS Marketplace was good."

"It is a more expensive APM among the competitors, which is fine because it also does a lot more on the auto-detection and the AI side... It is not a cheap product. None of them are. The price is fair, but I could use it on more projects if they had a lower price."

"We are looking forward to purchasing the solution on the AWS Marketplace."

"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."

"The cost is prohibitive."

"For those who appreciate the value and had issues with the visibility of the performance of their applications, then the pricing is good. For somebody who does not need it, it can be pricey, but overall, it is worth the money which it costs."

"It is expensive. However, our time to recover has been reduced, and this product has helped recuperate costs and provided us with ROI."

More AppDynamics pricing and cost advice

"Surprisingly, it is quite expensive. That is something that we could always see: Improved pricing and the overall construct on how do we use each license in regards to usage of the tool."

"The product is really fast to implement and gives customers instant value. This is important, because it reduces costs on the implementation."

"Licensing is a bit complicated for Dynatrace, and pricing is dependent on how much your organization invests."

"Product pricing can seem a little over complex, however this is minor and does not detract from the benefits of the solution."

"It's expensive."

"Dynatrace is usually paid on a yearly basis."

"Pricing is based on the number of servers monitored, so for big applications, it is a bit expensive."

"Its price is quite high. Although it is worth it, it would be better if its price is reduced. They base their prices around licensing. Their prices are based on agent licensing and consumption licensing. Both of these can be a bit cheaper, but if they are the best in the market, as I consider them to be, I assume that their prices will be higher. They are delivering the product for that price."

More Dynatrace pricing and cost advice

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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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Comparison Review

ITspe9886

IT Specialist at a government with 10,001+ employees

Feb 24, 2019

Compared to AppDynamics where we are still trying to get it into production, we had the latest version of Dynatrace in production within three days

Our primary use case for both Dynatrace and AppDynamics is for application performance monitoring (APM). The main reason for having application performance monitoring is, when we see something is running slowly, we can immediately look to see where the issue is at before our systems crash on us…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

48%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

33%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?

See all answers

APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit

Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...

See all answers

What do you like most about AppDynamics?

The solution saves time and cost.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?

Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Datadog vs AppDynamics

Compared 10% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs AppDynamics

Compared 9% of the time

New Relic vs AppDynamics

Compared 7% of the time

Elastic Observability vs AppDynamics

Compared 7% of the time

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs AppDynamics

Compared 6% of the time

More AppDynamics Competitors

Datadog vs Dynatrace

Compared 13% of the time

New Relic vs Dynatrace

Compared 8% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Dynatrace

Compared 8% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Dynatrace

Compared 7% of the time

Elastic Observability vs Dynatrace

Compared 6% of the time

More Dynatrace Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AppDynamics

November 2024

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Buyer's Guide

Dynatrace

November 2024

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Also Known As

AppD, AppDynamics APM

No data available

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AppDynamics

Dynatrace

Overview

AppDynamics is a comprehensive tool used for monitoring application performance, identifying user issues, analyzing traffic, managing infrastructure, and performance testing. It supports environments like Kubernetes, WebLogic, and Azure, and is crucial for industries such as banking, telecommunications, and financial services.

AppDynamics offers a robust solution for application performance monitoring, enabling deep diagnostics, transaction tracing, and root cause analysis. Users benefit from its real-time monitoring and comprehensive analytics capabilities. It's designed for ease of implementation and scalability, featuring intuitive dashboards that streamline infrastructure optimization and enhance user experience. AppDynamics supports extensive third-party extensions and provides proactive monitoring and alerting to ensure optimal system health. It assists in troubleshooting, database monitoring, and setting custom alerts to address Java applications and performance challenges efficiently.

What are the most important features of AppDynamics?

Application Performance Monitoring: Real-time insights into application health and performance
Business Transaction Capturing: Detailed tracking of business transactions across the application
Memory Monitoring: Monitoring memory usage to optimize application performance
Analytics: Advanced analytics to understand application and user behavior
Customizable Dashboards: Intuitive dashboards for better visualization and decision-making
Proactive Monitoring and Alerting: Immediate alerts and monitoring to prevent issues before they affect users
Integration Capabilities: Integration with third-party tools to extend functionality
Root Cause Analysis: Deep diagnostics to pinpoint and fix issues promptly
Transaction Mapping: Mapping transactions to understand and improve user journeys
Error Detection: Identifying and diagnosing errors to maintain application stability

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Ease of Implementation: Simple deployment process
Scalability: Ability to grow with the organization's needs
Time Savings: Reducing time spent on troubleshooting and issue resolution
Enhanced User Experience: Improving application performance for better user satisfaction
Cost Efficiency: Balancing functionality with cost to deliver value

AppDynamics is widely adopted in banking, telecommunications, and financial services to ensure optimal user experience and system health. Its capabilities support these industries in maintaining robust, efficient, and reliable applications. The tool is instrumental in troubleshooting, performance optimization, and providing a seamless user experience.

Dynatrace is an AI-powered software intelligence monitoring platform that accelerates digital transformation and simplifies cloud complexities. Dynatrace is an entirely automated full-stack solution that provides data and answers about the performance of your applications and deep insight into every transaction throughout every application, including the end-user experience. By modernizing and automating enterprise cloud operations, users can deliver an optimal digital experience with higher quality software to customers faster.

Dynatrace offers an all-in-one automated artificial intelligence solution that brings together application performance, cloud and infrastructure, and digital experience monitoring. Dynatrace accelerates performance-driven results through operations, development, and business teams with a shared metrics platform. In addition, users are provided a full-stack monitoring experience with three patented technologies:

Smartscape - visualization mechanism that maps the totality of everything working in your environment and detects any casual dependencies between your applications, processes, websites, services, hosts, cloud infrastructure, and networks.
OneAgent - a technology that analyzes, gathers ,and unifies all business performance metrics throughout every layer of your technology stack.
PurePath Technology - code-level context and timings are captured from the mainframe to the cloud for all end-to-end transactions.

What does Dynatrace offer?

Dynatrace redefines how organizations monitor their digital ecosystems. The solution offers:

Cloud Automation: With AI engine Davis®, users can see the exact reason for problems and facilitate quick auto-remediation and intelligent cloud orchestration.
Application Security: With automated application vulnerability management, users can deliver applications faster and more securely.
Infrastructure Monitoring: Convenient broad visibility across your environments is provided with streamlined, automated infrastructure monitoring.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): Optimize your applications, provide better support, and improve user experience with a combination of Real User Monitoring (RUM), Session Replay, and synthetic monitoring throughout your environment.
Applications and Microservices: For complex cloud environments, Dynatrace can automatically provide visibility and root-cause answers. It can also monitor microservices.
Digital Business Analytics: Get AI-powered, real-time answers to analytical business queries with KPIs and metrics that are already flowing through applications.

Reviews from Real Users

Dynatrace is the only solution that provides answers to organizations based on deep insight into each user, transaction, and organization's environment.

Barry P., a managing performance engineer at Medica Health Plans, writes, "With Dynatrace, we have synthetic checks and real-user monitoring of all of our websites, places where members and providers can interact with us over the web. We monitor the response times of those with Dynatrace, and it's all integrated into one place."

A consultant at a tech service company notes, "A feature that's one of the highlights of Dynatrace is the AI. The second most valuable feature is OneAgent. Between infrastructures, applications, operating systems, you can deploy with just a single agent and can practically install and forget about it."

Sample Customers

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

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express

Buyer's Guide

AppDynamics vs. Dynatrace

November 2024

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