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Actional vs Dynatrace 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

Actional
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
72nd
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
SOA Governance (4th)
Dynatrace
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
363
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (6th), Mobile APM (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd), AI Observability (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Actional is 0.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Dynatrace is 5.0%, down from 8.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Dynatrace5.0%
Actional0.6%
Other94.4%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

it_user690762 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
Provides speed and scaling in the cloud
Provides speed and scaling in the cloud Effortless scaling Never throws away data Takes action now Delivers analytics at the speed of business Automates and speeds up system discovery I would like to see better marketing. We have used this for four years. There are no deployment issues at this…
Manish Indupuri - PeerSpot reviewer
senior DevOps engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
AI-driven insights have reduced downtime and improved cross-team collaboration
We encountered some challenges while using Dynatrace. Although the initial setup was smooth, fine-tuning alert thresholds and custom metrics took some time. Another challenge was that Dynatrace charges based on host units, so we had to carefully plan our agent deployments. The licensing model is expensive. Additionally, the complexity of setup is an issue. While OneAgent and auto-discover services are powerful, the setup is more complex compared to other tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. These integrations are simple and basic, but Dynatrace setup requires more complexity based on the environment. For new users wanting to use Dynatrace, it is difficult. However, the AI-related solutions and metrics took us to the next level for identifying and fixing things. Dynatrace requires an agent for operation. OneAgent is powerful, but it is also resource-heavy. On lightweight nodes or older systems, the agent can slightly impact performance. If Dynatrace could implement a lightweight agent behavior, we could make things faster. Additionally, if Dynatrace could add a long-term retention policy so that we could store more data and find fine-grained details, that would help us. While Dynatrace managed edition supports on-premises deployment, the SaaS version depends on cloud connectivity. For highly regulated or air-gapped environments, setup and updates can be challenging. Although the initial setup is smooth, if someone wants to fine-tune it and fully understand the tool end-to-end, it could be tricky.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From a testing standpoint, ignoring license and cost issues, it's not a bad product."
"This tool has great scaling capabilities, i.e., no limitations."
"It saves your reputation once you have a product out there in the market and what you are doing to keep it up and running."
"This solution has helped us to improve application performance and reduce issue-impact with faster resolutions."
"Provides bespoke dashboards and reports which help our business to grow."
"PurePath is one of the best features."
"The linking is very good in Dynatrace. What happens in other monitoring tools is the linking is not proper. In those solutions, a person has to manually link many of the layers and what is happening in them, while in Dynatrace you get that from the very first visit. For example, if a person is visiting your website, from there it will traverse you to the end. If the application is a Java application, it will traverse you there, to the Method level. So that linking and traversing is better in Dynatrace."
"It is cleaner and more compact with good UX/UI."
"The overall application monitoring ability to do alerts."
"Dynatrace solved various kinds of Ops / DevOps issues for our customers including bad code, bad configurations, operational issues, etc."
 

Cons

"My concern is with Automation integration."
"For the user, for the customer, they expect a solution to be not so expensive."
"There are lots of features to share information, but we need to learn to leverage that, both on the web browser and on the mobile app."
"If you have many distributed servers, you will need to install or migrate every agent. This can be a problem if you have too many, and it takes time."
"Dynatrace also 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."
"If there was something that could be done at a local developer's station, something like, "Hey, here's a hint, this thing looks like it might not be optimized," or the like. I think more development features, to hedge that performance would be good."
"The licensing part is complicated or not transparent."
"We're not quite there yet, but the thing I would like to see is to really have that view of how issues relate to the business. Often enough, the tools that IT have for IT stop at the IT level. They cannot go into the business level part. They can't understand, because they don't have the information that the business needs to provide them with - for example how much an hour of downtime costs the business. For us, in IT, it's an hour of downtime, but it equates to money and equates to hours lost and equates to a lot of things, and often enough we don't have that information. This is where I would like to see us going."
"Improvements are needed in the navigation and time-frame selection when browsing problems, sometimes the time-frame set changes and I need to re-set it again, plus I find the navigation bar on the top left quite cumbersome."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The product is pricey, but it is feature-rich, which is why we probably haven't looked away from it."
"​I would recommend doing a PoC."
"The product is really fast to implement and gives customers instant value. This is important, because it reduces costs on the implementation."
"We have a three-year contract. We have 30 licenses for the full stack and 3 licenses for the DEM unit."
"Getting the first agents installed, getting information, and coverage in a initial set of systems can be done in hours and with a low cost entry point."
"It's understandable to do a smaller scale initial evaluation. However, as you identify the product value, don't hesitant in your scope and scale to maximize the initial investment and your opportunity to do a bulk investment of the product."
"Just go with Dynatrace. Just start with Dynatrace. Do not go into AppMon. Start with Dynatrace, because AppMon is going to give you so much extra stuff that 99% of your user base will not need it, including yourself."
"Pricing can be high, especially for Portuguese standards. But as one says, you get what you pay for."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
18%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business81
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise303
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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...
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...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Proximus, Air France-KLM, Barratt Developments, Freedom Mortgage
TD Bank, Zurich North America, Accenture, Macquarie, United Airlines, Raymond James, BT, Vodafone, Air France-KLM, TELUS, American Airlines, Air Canada, ADT, Virgin Money
Find out what your peers are saying about Actional vs. Dynatrace and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.