AppDynamics vs Dynatrace: pricing, which is better, and how both compare to Datadog and New Relic
Short answer: these two meter the same server on different hardware. Splunk AppDynamics bills per vCPU, from $6 a month on Infrastructure Edition to $33 on Premium and $50 on Enterprise. Dynatrace bills per gigabyte of host memory, $0.01 per GiB-hour, which is $58 a month for an 8 GiB host. Solve for where they meet and you get 4.52 GiB of RAM per vCPU. Below that ratio Dynatrace is cheaper, above it AppDynamics is, so on AWS the instance family you picked has already decided the answer. On browser synthetics the gap is far wider: AppDynamics charges a flat $12 per test location a month, Dynatrace charges $0.0045 per action, which is $197.25 for one one-minute check. Neither checks faster than once a minute.
Last updated August 2026 · US dollar list prices checked August 2026
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▸ waiting…▌
queued probing▌
If ever goes down, you get:
Alert fired ▸ 2 channels · 6.2 s after first failure
AlertPing app
● DOWN : HTTP timeout confirmed from 3/3 regions (FRA, IAD, SIN). Incident opened.
sms · on-call
AlertPing: DOWN. Confirmed 3/3 regions . First fail: Frankfurt.
the short version
One bills your cores, the other bills your RAM
Most AppDynamics versus Dynatrace write-ups compare agent architecture, dashboards and how clever each vendor's AI is. Those are real differences and they matter once you own the tool. They are not what makes one invoice three times the other. The billing unit is, and the two units are measuring different halves of the same machine.
AppDynamics prices per virtual CPU. Infrastructure Edition starts at $6 per vCPU a month billed annually, Premium at $33 and Enterprise at $50. Add-ons follow the same core-based logic: Secure Application is $13.75 a month per CPU core and SAP monitoring is $95 per CPU core. The exceptions are real user monitoring at $0.06 per 1,000 tokens and browser synthetics at $12 per test location a month, which is a flat rate and, as you will see below, the single largest price gap on this page.
Dynatrace prices per gigabyte of host memory. Full-Stack Monitoring is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour, which the rate card summarizes as $58 a month for an 8 GiB host. Infrastructure Monitoring is $0.04 per host-hour, a flat $29 a month whatever the machine. Synthetics are consumption units: $1.00 per 1,000 HTTP requests and $4.50 per 1,000 browser actions. Real user monitoring is $2.25 per 1,000 sessions and application security is $13 a month per 8 GiB host. No seat fees anywhere.
So the comparison reduces to a hardware question. A compute-optimized fleet has few gigabytes per core and bills badly on AppDynamics. A memory-optimized fleet has many gigabytes per core and bills badly on Dynatrace. Everything below is the arithmetic behind that sentence, plus the one thing neither vendor will sell you at any price.
read this first
AppDynamics is now Splunk AppDynamics, and that changes the shortlist
If you type appdynamics.com/pricing into a browser today you do not land on an AppDynamics page. You get a 301 redirect to Splunk's observability pricing, where the product is listed as Splunk AppDynamics. Cisco acquired AppDynamics, Cisco acquired Splunk, and the observability portfolio has been folded together. The practical consequence for a buyer is that the same account team now sells you two overlapping products with completely different billing models, and the cheaper one is not always the one you asked about.
Splunk Observability Cloud sits on the same price list as Splunk AppDynamics and prices per host, not per vCPU: Infrastructure Monitoring from $15 a host a month, APM from $55 a host, database monitoring from $75 per instance, real user monitoring from $14 per 10,000 sessions and synthetic monitoring from $1 per 10,000 uptime requests. Splunk On-Call is separate again at $5 per user a month for up to ten seats.
That matters, because $55 per host a month for APM is flat regardless of how much memory the host has, while AppDynamics Premium on the same machine scales with core count and Dynatrace Full-Stack scales with RAM. On a 64 GiB, 8 vCPU database server the three land at $55, $264 and $467.20 respectively for broadly comparable application monitoring. Before you run the AppDynamics versus Dynatrace comparison at all, make sure you have priced the third SKU sitting on the same quotation.
| Product | Billing unit | Entry list price | Scales with |
|---|---|---|---|
| Splunk AppDynamics Infrastructure | Per vCPU per month | From $6 | Core count |
| Splunk AppDynamics Premium | Per vCPU per month | From $33 | Core count |
| Splunk AppDynamics Enterprise | Per vCPU per month | From $50 | Core count |
| Splunk Observability Cloud APM | Per host per month | From $55 | Host count only |
| Splunk Observability Cloud Infrastructure | Per host per month | From $15 | Host count only |
| Dynatrace Full-Stack | Per memory-GiB-hour | $0.01, so $58 per 8 GiB host | Host memory |
| Dynatrace Infrastructure | Per host-hour | $0.04, so $29 per host | Host count only |
One honesty note that applies to this whole page. Dynatrace publishes a granular rate card you can model a bill from without speaking to anyone. Splunk publishes "starts at" figures, and AppDynamics has always been sold through enterprise agreements where the negotiated rate can sit well below list. Treat the AppDynamics numbers here as a ceiling and a way to compare shapes, not as a quote. The Dynatrace numbers are the actual published rates.
side by side
AppDynamics vs Dynatrace vs AlertPing
Figures are US dollar list prices published in August 2026, taken from Splunk's observability pricing page (where appdynamics.com/pricing now redirects), dynatrace.com/pricing and both vendors' own documentation. Both negotiate at volume. Ours are on the pricing page, and the wider field is on our uptime monitoring pricing comparison.
| Splunk AppDynamics | Dynatrace | AlertPing | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you are billed for | Virtual CPUs | Host memory and consumption | A flat monthly plan |
| Application monitoring | $33 per vCPU Premium, $50 Enterprise | $58 per 8 GiB host Full-Stack, at $0.01 per GiB-hour | None. We are not an APM |
| Infrastructure monitoring | $6 per vCPU | $29 per host, flat whatever the size | Ping and port checks only |
| Seat cost | Not published separately; folded into the edition | None. Unlimited users | None. Unlimited team members |
| Browser synthetics | $12 per test location per month, flat | $4.50 per 1,000 synthetic actions | Not offered |
| HTTP or API synthetics | Included in the synthetic add-on | $1.00 per 1,000 synthetic requests | Included, unmetered |
| Synthetic locations | 17 AWS locations documented | Public locations plus private synthetic nodes | Three regions, all confirming every alert |
| Fastest check interval | 1 minute, documented | 1 minute | 30 seconds, 15 on Enterprise |
| Real user monitoring | $0.06 per 1,000 tokens | $2.25 per 1,000 sessions | Not offered |
| Application security | Secure Application, $13.75 per CPU core | $13 per 8 GiB host | Not offered |
| SAP monitoring | $95 per CPU core | Covered in platform, priced on request | Not offered |
| Published rate card | "Starts at" figures only | Yes, granular and modelable | Yes, three fixed plans |
| Agent required | Yes | Yes, OneAgent | No |
| SMS alerts | Via Splunk On-Call, $5 per user a month | Via problem notifications and integrations | Unmetered on every plan |
| Entry price for one URL | $12 a month for one browser test location | $43.83 a month for one one-minute HTTP check | $19 a month, flat |
the break-even
4.52 gigabytes per core is where the answer flips
Because one vendor charges per core and the other per gigabyte, you can solve for the machine shape where they cost the same. Dynatrace Full-Stack is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour, so over a 730-hour month a gigabyte costs $7.30. AppDynamics Premium is $33 per vCPU. Divide $33 by $7.30 and you get 4.52. Any server carrying more than 4.52 GiB of RAM per virtual CPU is cheaper on AppDynamics. Any server carrying less is cheaper on Dynatrace. On Enterprise Edition at $50 per vCPU the line moves out to 6.85 GiB per core.
That number is more useful than it looks, because cloud instance families are built to fixed memory ratios. AWS compute-optimized instances give you 2 GiB per vCPU, general purpose gives 4, memory-optimized gives 8, and the high-memory families go to 16. Three of those four sit on definite sides of the line, and the fourth sits close enough that the decision is nearly a coin toss.
| Instance | Shape | GiB per vCPU | AppDynamics Premium | Dynatrace Full-Stack | Cheaper by |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| c7g.2xlarge | 8 vCPU, 16 GiB | 2 | $264.00 | $116.80 | Dynatrace, $147.20 |
| m7g.2xlarge | 8 vCPU, 32 GiB | 4 | $264.00 | $233.60 | Dynatrace, $30.40 |
| r7g.2xlarge | 8 vCPU, 64 GiB | 8 | $264.00 | $467.20 | AppDynamics, $203.20 |
| x2gd.2xlarge | 8 vCPU, 128 GiB | 16 | $264.00 | $934.40 | AppDynamics, $670.40 |
Look at what happens across those four rows. The AppDynamics column never moves, because all four machines have eight cores. The Dynatrace column runs from $116.80 to $934.40, an eight-fold spread, because all that changed is memory. If your estate is Kubernetes nodes and stateless API servers you are on the left of that table and Dynatrace is the cheaper platform. If it is Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch and JVM heaps you are on the right, and it is not close.
The infrastructure tiers cross at a different place, and in the opposite direction. AppDynamics Infrastructure Edition is $6 per vCPU, so a 2-core box is $12 a month. Dynatrace Infrastructure is a flat $29.20 whatever the machine. Divide and the crossover is 4.87 cores: at four cores or fewer AppDynamics is cheaper, at five or more Dynatrace is, and a 64-core machine costs $384 on AppDynamics against $29.20 on Dynatrace. So the sensible answer for many estates is neither vendor outright but a split, priced per machine shape rather than once for everything.
Treat all of this as a sighting shot rather than a quote. It ignores log and trace ingest on both sides, it ignores enterprise agreement discounting, and it assumes list pricing. What the ratio is good for is telling you which vendor to model properly first, which saves a week of spreadsheets.
synthetic monitoring
On browser checks the gap is 16 times, and it favors AppDynamics
This is the part we know best, and the honest answer does not favor us. The two vendors do not just charge different amounts for browser synthetic monitoring, they charge on different axes entirely, and that produces the largest single price gap anywhere on this page.
AppDynamics charges $12 per test location per month. Flat. Run the script once an hour or once a minute and the invoice is identical. Dynatrace charges $4.50 per 1,000 synthetic actions, where every click, navigation and assertion in the script counts as one action. A one-minute monitor executes 43,833 times in an average 30.44-day month, so even a trivial single-action script is 43,833 actions, which is $197.25 a month from one location. That is 16.4 times the AppDynamics price for the same check.
Because one side is flat and the other is metered, there is a crossover, and it is worth knowing exactly where it sits. $12 divided by $0.0045 is 2,667 actions a month. Spread across 43,833 minutes that is one run every 16.4 minutes. So with a single-action script, Dynatrace is cheaper only if you check less often than roughly every quarter of an hour.
| Check interval | Runs a month | Dynatrace, 1-action script | Dynatrace, 5-action script | AppDynamics, 1 location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every minute | 43,833 | $197.25 | $986.24 | $12.00 |
| Every 5 minutes | 8,767 | $39.45 | $197.26 | $12.00 |
| Every 15 minutes | 2,922 | $13.15 | $65.74 | $12.00 |
| Every 30 minutes | 1,461 | $6.57 | $32.87 | $12.00 |
| Every hour | 731 | $3.29 | $16.45 | $12.00 |
Read the fourth column, because it is the realistic one. A checkout journey that loads a page, searches, opens a product, adds to cart and reaches payment is five actions, and at that length Dynatrace only becomes cheaper if you run it less than once every 82 minutes. Almost nobody monitors a checkout hourly. For any genuine browser journey at any genuine frequency, the flat $12 per location wins, and it wins by an order of magnitude.
Plain HTTP uptime checks run the other way. Dynatrace HTTP monitors are $1.00 per 1,000 synthetic requests, and the documentation is exact about the counting: one request is consumed each time a monitor runs, for each HTTP request executed, at each location. A one-minute check from a single location is $43.83 a month and three locations is $131.50. The Splunk Observability Cloud rate for the same job is $1 per 10,000 uptime requests, which works out at $4.38 a month for that one-minute check. Exactly ten times cheaper, from the same account team, on a different SKU.
If you already run one of these platforms for tracing, the sensible move is usually to keep it and not to also buy an uptime tool. The case for a separate tool is narrower than vendors on either side admit: you want it when detection speed genuinely matters, when you need the alert to fire from outside your own cloud account, or when the people who need to see a status page are customers rather than engineers.
the interval floor
Every major APM stops at one minute, including these two
The Splunk AppDynamics synthetic monitoring documentation states plainly that the minimum frequency support for API monitoring is one minute. Dynatrace lists HTTP monitor frequencies of 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes, plus on demand. New Relic documents EVERY_MINUTE as its shortest synthetic period. Datadog documents the same floor, which we worked through on our Datadog vs Dynatrace comparison. That is four platforms, four vendors and one identical limit. No tier, contract or enterprise agreement buys you faster. It is a product decision across the whole category, not a budget question.
Average detection latency is roughly half the check interval, plus whatever confirmation logic runs before anyone is paged. On a one-minute schedule a typical outage is already 30 seconds old before the first failed check. Against a 99.99% target the entire monthly error budget is 4 minutes and 23 seconds, so a minute of detection lag spends a quarter of it before the page fires. The full arithmetic is under SLA monitoring.
For plenty of teams that is fine. If you are watching an internal service against a 99.5% target, a minute of lag is noise and you should not pay anyone to remove it. It is simply worth knowing before you sign rather than after.
honest scorecard
Where each one genuinely wins
We sell an uptime monitor, so read this as interested but checkable. Everything here can be verified against the vendors' own pricing pages and documentation.
AppDynamics wins on
- Browser synthetics, decisively. $12 per test location a month, flat, against $197.25 for the same one-minute check on Dynatrace. Cheaper than our own entry plan for that one job.
- Memory-heavy estates. Per-vCPU billing does not care how much RAM a database server has, and Dynatrace cares a great deal.
- Depth on older enterprise stacks, including SAP as a priced first-class add-on at $95 per CPU core.
- Enterprise agreement leverage. Being inside the Cisco and Splunk portfolio means the list price is a starting point, not the number you pay.
- A documented 17 AWS synthetic locations for API monitoring without needing private nodes.
Dynatrace wins on
- A published, granular rate card. You can model a bill to the cent before contacting sales, which you cannot do with AppDynamics.
- Compute-dense fleets. Containers and stateless API nodes carry little memory per core, which is exactly where per-GiB billing is cheap.
- No seat fees at all, so putting a whole engineering org in the console costs nothing.
- OneAgent automatic topology discovery and Davis AI root cause, which name the failing component rather than hand you dashboards to correlate.
- Application security at $13 per 8 GiB host, against $13.75 per CPU core, which on an 8 vCPU 16 GiB host is $26.00 versus $110.
AlertPing wins on
- Detection speed. 30-second checks on the $59 Team plan and 15 seconds on Enterprise, which neither platform sells at any price.
- Flat pricing. Adding monitors, regions or teammates does not move the bill, and nothing is metered.
- Three-region confirmation before alerting, so a single flaky probe does not page anyone.
- Unmetered SMS on every plan, rather than a separate on-call product at $5 per user.
- Setup measured in minutes, with no agent to deploy on anything.
the honest part
We do not replace either platform
If you are comparing AppDynamics and Dynatrace seriously, you are buying observability, and we are not an observability platform. AlertPing has no APM, no distributed tracing, no log management, no real user monitoring, no code-level profiling, no infrastructure metrics and no AI root cause analysis. When your checkout breaks, we will tell you fast and from three regions. We will not tell you which database query caused it. Both of these vendors will, and that is what the price buys.
We also do not do scripted multi-step browser journeys, page speed scoring, domain expiry, blacklist monitoring, server agent metrics or white labeling. There is no free plan. Note the first item on that list carefully in the context of this page: if browser journey monitoring is what you need, AppDynamics at $12 per location is both better at it than us and cheaper than us, and this page has done its job by telling you so.
Where we fit is alongside. Plenty of teams run a full platform for diagnosis and a small external monitor for detection, because a probe running inside the same cloud account that just failed is not an independent witness. We wrote up how that pairing works in practice in uptime monitoring to pair with an APM. It costs $19 a month and is the whole reason this page exists.
which to buy
Eight situations and the answer for each
Kubernetes nodes and stateless API servers
Dynatrace. Compute-optimized shapes carry about 2 GiB per core, well under the 4.52 crossover. A 16 GiB, 8 vCPU node is $116.80 against $264 on AppDynamics Premium.
Postgres, Redis and large JVM heaps
AppDynamics. Memory-optimized shapes sit at 8 to 16 GiB per core. A 128 GiB, 8 vCPU machine is $264 on Premium against $934.40 on Dynatrace Full-Stack.
You mainly need browser journey monitoring
AppDynamics, by a distance. $12 per test location a month flat, against $986.24 for a five-action script running every minute on Dynatrace. Frequency does not change the AppDynamics bill.
You want to model the bill before talking to sales
Dynatrace. Its rate card is published per GiB-hour, per request and per session. AppDynamics publishes "starts at" figures and expects a conversation.
A handful of big multi-core machines
Compare against Dynatrace Infrastructure at a flat $29.20, not Full-Stack. Above 4.87 cores it beats AppDynamics Infrastructure Edition, and a 64-core box is $29.20 against $384.
Sub-minute detection is a hard requirement
Neither platform qualifies, at any budget. Both floor at one minute, as do New Relic and Datadog. Pair whichever platform you prefer with an external monitor that runs faster.
You are already a Splunk customer
Price Splunk Observability Cloud alongside AppDynamics before comparing either to Dynatrace. APM at $55 a host is flat regardless of RAM or cores, which beats both on large machines.
You only want to know when the site is down
Neither. You are pricing observability platforms for a job a $19 flat plan does faster. Come back to these two when you need to know why, not just whether.
questions
AppDynamics vs Dynatrace, answered
AppDynamics vs Dynatrace: which is better?
It depends on your hardware, not on quality. AppDynamics bills per vCPU and Dynatrace per gigabyte of host memory, so they cross at 4.52 GiB of RAM per core. Memory-heavy fleets are cheaper on AppDynamics, compute-dense fleets on Dynatrace. Dynatrace has the better published rate card and automatic root cause; AppDynamics has far cheaper browser synthetics.
AppDynamics vs Dynatrace pricing: which is cheaper?
Neither, consistently. AppDynamics Premium is $33 per vCPU a month and Dynatrace Full-Stack is $58 per 8 GiB host, which is $7.30 per GiB. On an 8 vCPU 16 GiB instance that is $264 against $116.80, so Dynatrace wins. On an 8 vCPU 128 GiB instance it is $264 against $934.40, so AppDynamics wins.
How much does AppDynamics cost per CPU core?
Splunk AppDynamics lists Infrastructure Edition from $6 per vCPU a month billed annually, Premium Edition from $33 and Enterprise Edition from $50. Add-ons are priced separately: Secure Application at $13.75 per CPU core, SAP monitoring at $95 per CPU core and browser synthetics at $12 per test location.
Does Dynatrace charge per user?
No. Dynatrace has no seat licensing at all. Its rate card is built on host memory and consumption units, so adding people to the console costs nothing. AppDynamics does not publish a separate seat price either, folding access into the per-vCPU edition cost.
Is AppDynamics the same as Splunk AppDynamics?
Yes. Cisco acquired AppDynamics and then Splunk, and the product is now marketed as Splunk AppDynamics. The old appdynamics.com/pricing URL 301-redirects to Splunk's observability pricing page, where AppDynamics editions sit alongside the separate Splunk Observability Cloud SKUs.
Does AppDynamics or Dynatrace do 30-second checks?
Neither does. The Splunk AppDynamics documentation states the minimum frequency support for API monitoring is one minute, and Dynatrace lists 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 30 and 60 minute frequencies. New Relic and Datadog share the same floor. One minute is the category limit, and no contract changes it.
Which is cheaper for browser synthetic monitoring?
AppDynamics, by roughly sixteen times at a one-minute interval. It charges a flat $12 per test location a month. Dynatrace charges $0.0045 per synthetic action, so a single-action script running every minute is $197.25. Dynatrace only becomes cheaper below about one run every 16 minutes.
AppDynamics vs Dynatrace vs Datadog: how do the three compare?
All three are full observability platforms and all three floor at one minute. They differ on billing axis: AppDynamics on virtual CPUs, Dynatrace on host memory and consumption, Datadog on a per-product mix with per-run synthetics. AppDynamics is the cheapest of the three for high-frequency browser journeys.
Can I use Dynatrace just for uptime monitoring?
Technically yes with HTTP monitors, but the economics are poor. A single one-minute check from one location is $43.83 a month and three locations is $131.50, and you still get a slower interval than a $19 flat plan. Dynatrace earns its price on tracing and root cause, not on pinging a URL.
Why is Dynatrace more expensive on database servers?
Because Full-Stack Monitoring is billed at $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour rather than per core, and database servers are bought for their memory. A 128 GiB host is $934.40 a month on Full-Stack. Infrastructure Monitoring is a flat $29.20 whatever the size, so the two tiers cross over at exactly 4 GiB of RAM.
keep reading
Related comparisons
- Dynatrace vs Splunk pricing, the flat per-host SKU that sits beside AppDynamics on the same rate card.
- New Relic vs Dynatrace pricing, seat billing against host billing and the six-hosts-per-engineer line.
- Datadog vs Dynatrace pricing, including the per-action versus per-run browser billing flip.
- Datadog vs New Relic synthetics pricing, the third side of the APM triangle.
- How much AppDynamics costs, the full edition and add-on rate card.
- How much Dynatrace costs, the whole consumption rate card.
- Best uptime monitoring tools, the full roundup with pricing.
- Uptime monitoring pricing compared across fifteen vendors.
- Synthetic monitoring vs uptime monitoring, what you are actually buying with each.
- API monitoring with assertions, our own status code, keyword and JSON path checks.
“Our old tool paged me at 3am for blips that fixed themselves in a minute. AlertPing only pages when all three regions agree it's really down. I sleep again.”
SRE lead, payments SaaS
“I run 40 client sites. One dashboard, one status page per client, and SMS that does not cost extra credits. The math was not close.”
Founder, web agency
“We sell a 99.9% SLA. AlertPing's reports are what we attach to the quarterly review. Our biggest customer stopped asking for proof.”
CTO, logistics platform
Detection speed neither platform sells
Checks confirmed from three regions, SMS on every plan, flat from $19 a month with no cores, no gigabytes and no metering. 30-second checks from $59. Running in under a minute.