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 8.5. AppDynamics holds a 5.2% mindshare in APM, compared to Dynatrace’s 12.4% 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

14,012 Views
8,865 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Dynatrace

Read 344 Dynatrace reviews

34,694 Views
21,128 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

AppDynamics

Dynatrace

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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: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

AppDynamics vs. Dynatrace

January 2025

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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

AppDynamics

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

5th

Ranking in Mobile APM

2nd

Ranking in Container Monitoring

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

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

1st

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

344

Ranking in other categories

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

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AppDynamics is 5.2%, down from 6.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 12.4%, down from 14.5% 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

Mahesh Deshpande

Senior Technology Architect at Infosys

The transition tracing and user experience are good, but performance degrades past 3,000 or so agents

The Kubernetes cluster agent has not yet matured. That's one area that requires a lot of improvement. You have two options for implementing the Kubernetes agent. One is deployed in DocCloud, but you can't download those images from DocCloud for security reasons at most organizations, so this option isn't that useful. The installation for the second option isn't that user-friendly. Transition tracing for the Kubernetes application is challenging. You have to navigate to a new set of user interfaces in AppDynamics, so that's the pain point. There is an icon you need to click on to get a newer user interface.

Read full review

Manish Ved

Lead Infrastructure Domain Architect (Systems) at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Solution has a useful AI engine, but the reports could be a bit better

We are typically about a version or two behind. We are on the managed solution. Our model of deployment is on-premises. I would say there are a couple of thousand users of this solution in our company. We are also planning on increasing the usage as our apps migrate to the cloud. I would advise other people looking into solutions, to do their homework beforehand and not assume that by deploying all the tools everything will automatically work, so there's still a lot of configuration involved. I would rate this solution as a whole an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

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

"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."

"In 2014 and 2015, AppDynamics was one of the best products on the market."

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

"It allows us to configure health rules so that we can, based on our own experience, determine when an application is behaving incorrectly."

"This solution not only provides answers but also provides sensor data. This allows us to quickly resolve issues that developers may take a long time to solve."

"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."

"The solution helps us save a lot of time on certain tasks."

More AppDynamics pros

"Integration within the CI/CD pipeline helps avoid problems in production by detecting application faults upfront."

"We had point solutions where we could see different elements of the stack, and Dynatrace ties everything together. Before, we could never get that full-stack monitoring. It also helps us get us the context of the customer experience. What's the business impact of those problems?"

"The solution can be deployed quickly on-prem. Once it's deployed, you can use discovery and review the process and service on this application."

"The alerting mechanism where you get millions of dependencies analyzed, in one alert or "problem" as Dynatrace calls it."

"For stability, our customers have no complaints."

"PurePath does deep dive analysis, has dashboards, and provides real user experience monitoring. It has allowed us to do analysis which was never possible before."

"Scalability is outstanding. It won't tax our environment at all as it will scale sideways."

"The Session Replay not only allows us to watch the user in 4K video, but to see the individual steps happening behind the scenes, from a developer perspective. It gives us every single step that a user takes in a session, along with the ability to watch it as a video playback. We can see each call to every server as the user goes through the site. If something is broken or not running optimally, it's going to come up in the Session Replay."

More Dynatrace pros

Cons

"When you have high stress of visits I do not know if you are more stress because of the amount of visits or because you have to wait eternal 60 seconds to find out it things are going well or you already have mess."

"We have had downtime, which has been the result of config, application, or cord issues."

"The solution's user interface should be improved."

"AppDynamics' modules and hardware resources are very high."

"In the current version of AppDynamics, there is a correlated section, where we can see all servers’ performance along with application performance, but network performance is missing."

"The QA and test environment need improvement."

"The integration with cloud services is still pending with AppDynamics. We would like the product to be serverless."

"The network diagnostics that they are adding will be really useful. They could add more detail into what is going on in the network."

More AppDynamics cons

"Log analytics in the classic synthetic and RUM tools would be a great addition."

"The pricing of the product could be improved."

"It would be nice if there were a way that it could be made simpler, given the complexity of the things that we're monitoring."

"The dashboard tool needs to be improved. We need more options, because the look and feel is too old-fashioned."

"Dynatrace has APIs, but they are unfriendly APIs. If they were friendly like Splunk or Sumo Logic had, we might integrate that same data on a single webpage, then start showing these internally."

"In regards to Diffie-Hellman encryption stuff, it is a hurdle with what we are doing with DC RUM, where everyone is embracing stronger security suites, but the whole point of DC RUM is to get that data between the tiers."

"The analytics feature provides us some information, but is limited for now. We want to see how we can consume the data further down and have analytics guys look at the datacenter information."

"The usability is worse than it used to be."

More Dynatrace cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"There is a license for the solution and we paid approximately $2,000. There is also an additional cost above the standard license which cost us approximately $3,000."

"As a technical person, and as an application development team, they all understand that this is the right tool for us. But when it comes to budget and financial matters, it takes days and weeks to convince upper management to buy this tool. So they should do something more on licensing costs."

"There is a license to use this solution. However, the clients pay for the licenses we are the service provider."

"We do not have any issues with the price."

"Yearly payments have to be made toward the licensing costs of the solution. The solution has no additional costs apart from the licensing costs."

"It is not a cheap tool, but you also save in manpower to setup because it is easy and fast. At the end of the day, I think the revenue is much better. BUT, they have an awful co-term mode of licensing."

"The solution is highly expensive"

More AppDynamics pricing and cost advice

"We found a tool that can be utilized by testing, DevOps, marketing, software engineering, and monitoring. Before, we always had everybody doing their own thing. Now, everybody's utilizing one tool, which is huge. That is a huge savings."

"Our annual costs were about the same for both AppDynamics and Dynatrace."

"Licensing is very interesting, as you pay only for what is being monitored. A lot of things are given away for no additional cost. If you have a great IT consolidation, it will be pretty cheap. If you have a lot of servers, it will be heavier."

"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."

"We are buying more licenses, because we are seeing more value."

"The pricing is not bad, but it could be better."

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

"While it is quite good in respect to its functionality, there are few area in regards to pricing that they can look at how to possibly change. I have heard it's costly."

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

50%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

34%

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 6% of the time

Grafana vs AppDynamics

Compared 5% of the time

More AppDynamics Competitors

Datadog vs Dynatrace

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Dynatrace

Compared 7% of the time

New Relic vs Dynatrace

Compared 7% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Dynatrace

Compared 6% of the time

Elastic Observability vs Dynatrace

Compared 6% of the time

More Dynatrace Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

AppDynamics

January 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Dynatrace

January 2025

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Also Known As

AppD, AppDynamics APM

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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

January 2025

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