Dynatrace vs Splunk: pricing, Observability Cloud cost, and which is cheaper for uptime monitoring
Short answer: Splunk bills a flat rate per host, Dynatrace bills per gigabyte of host memory, so the answer is decided by how much RAM your servers carry. Splunk Observability Cloud APM is $55 per host a month billed annually. Dynatrace Full-Stack is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour, which is $7.30 per GiB a month. They cross at 7.53 GiB of RAM per host. Below that Dynatrace is cheaper, above it Splunk is, and the gap widens fast: a 64 GiB database server is $467.20 on Dynatrace against $55 on Splunk. On plain uptime checks the gap is even starker and runs the same way. Splunk charges $1 per 10,000 uptime requests, Dynatrace $1.00 per 1,000, so Dynatrace is exactly ten times more expensive per check. Neither one checks faster than once a minute.
Last updated August 2026 · US dollar list prices checked August 2026
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the short version
One charges by the machine, the other by the memory inside it
Most Dynatrace versus Splunk write-ups compare log analytics heritage against APM heritage, or argue about whose AI names root cause faster. Those differences are real. They are not what makes one renewal quote four times the other. The billing unit does that, and here the two vendors have picked units that behave in completely different ways as your fleet grows.
Splunk Observability Cloud prices per host, flat. Infrastructure Monitoring starts at $15 per host a month billed annually and APM at $55 per host a month. The bundled editions are $15, $60 and $75 per host a month for Starter, Growth and Enterprise. A host is a host: a 2 GiB container node and a 512 GiB database server cost the same. Consumption products sit outside that. Synthetic uptime requests start at $1 per 10,000, browser tests at $12 per test location a month, and real user monitoring at $14 per 10,000 sessions.
Dynatrace prices per gigabyte of host memory. Full-Stack Monitoring is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour, summarized on its own rate card as $58 a month for an 8 GiB host. Infrastructure Monitoring is $0.04 per host-hour, a flat $29.20 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, application security $13 a month per 8 GiB host. There are no seat fees anywhere in the Dynatrace rate card.
So the comparison collapses into one question about your hardware. Splunk's per-host price is a ceiling that never moves. Dynatrace's per-GiB price is a slope with no ceiling at all. Small machines favor Dynatrace, big machines favor Splunk, and everything below is the arithmetic behind that sentence, plus the thing neither vendor will sell you at any price.
All monthly figures on this page use a 730-hour month for hourly meters and 43,833 runs a month for a one-minute check, which is an average 30.44-day month. Prices are US list, billed annually, taken from each vendor's own published rate card in August 2026.
read this first
Splunk sells you two different APM products, and they overlap
This is the part that catches buyers out, and you will not find it stated plainly on either vendor's site. Splunk now owns AppDynamics. Cisco acquired AppDynamics, then acquired Splunk, and the product is marketed as Splunk AppDynamics. The old appdynamics.com pricing URL 301-redirects to Splunk's observability pricing page. So when you ask Splunk for an APM quote, there are two answers on the same rate card, and they are billed on different axes.
Splunk Observability Cloud APM is $55 per host a month. Splunk AppDynamics is priced per virtual CPU, from $6 a month on Infrastructure Edition to $33 on Premium and $50 on Enterprise. Both are Splunk. Both do application performance monitoring. On an 8 vCPU host, AppDynamics Premium is $264 a month and Observability Cloud APM is $55 for the same machine. That is not a discount you negotiate, it is a different SKU, and which one an account team leads with depends on which part of the portfolio the conversation started in.
The overlap matters for one line item in particular. Splunk's published browser synthetic price, $12 per test location a month, is labeled on Splunk's own pricing page as an AppDynamics offering. It is the AppDynamics product sold under the Splunk banner. So the browser synthetics answer in this comparison is the same answer you get in AppDynamics vs Dynatrace, because it is literally the same meter. Ask for both SKUs in writing before you sign anything, because the two prices for the job you actually want can differ by five times.
rate cards side by side
Dynatrace vs Splunk pricing, meter by meter
Both vendors publish list prices, which is more than most of this category does. The rows are matched by job, not by product name, because the two catalogs are organized differently. AlertPing is in the third column for the one row where a flat plan is genuinely the cheaper answer, and left blank everywhere we do not compete.
| What you are buying | Dynatrace | Splunk Observability Cloud | AlertPing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Billing axis | Host memory and consumption | Flat per host, plus consumption | Flat per plan |
| Full application monitoring | $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour, $58/mo per 8 GiB host | APM $55 per host/mo | Not offered |
| Infrastructure only | $0.04 per host-hour, $29.20/mo | $15 per host/mo | Not offered |
| Bundled editions | No bundles, per-meter only | Starter $15, Growth $60, Enterprise $75 per host/mo | Flat plans, $19, $59 and $189/mo |
| Second APM product | None | Splunk AppDynamics, $6 to $50 per vCPU/mo | None |
| HTTP uptime checks | $1.00 per 1,000 synthetic requests | $1 per 10,000 uptime requests | Included, unmetered |
| Browser synthetic checks | $4.50 per 1,000 synthetic actions | $12 per test location/mo, flat | Not offered |
| Real user monitoring | $2.25 per 1,000 sessions | $14 per 10,000 sessions | Not offered |
| Session replay | $4.50 per 1,000 sessions | Not separately listed | Not offered |
| Application security | $13/mo per 8 GiB host | Quoted separately | Not offered |
| Log ingest | $0.20 per GiB, query $0.0035 per GiB scanned | Log Observer Connect, bundled into editions | Not offered |
| Fastest check interval | 1 minute | 1 minute | 60s on Starter, 30s from Team ($59/mo) |
| Seat fees | None | None published | None |
| SMS alerts | Via integration | Via integration | Included on every plan |
| Public status page | Not offered | Not offered | Included |
| Entry price | Consumption, no floor published | $15 per host/mo annually | $19/mo flat |
the break-even
The two meters cross at 7.53 GiB of RAM per host
This is the number that decides the invoice, and neither vendor will compute it for you. Dynatrace Full-Stack Monitoring is $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour. Over a 730-hour month that is $7.30 per gigabyte. Splunk Observability Cloud APM is $55 per host a month regardless of what is in the host. Divide $55 by $7.30 and you get 7.53 GiB.
Under 7.53 GiB of RAM per machine, Dynatrace Full-Stack costs less than Splunk APM. Over it, Splunk costs less, and because one side is flat and the other is a straight line through the origin, the gap does not level off. It compounds with every gigabyte you add.
| Host memory | Dynatrace Full-Stack | Splunk APM | Dynatrace as a multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 GiB container node | $14.60/mo | $55.00/mo | 0.27x, Dynatrace wins |
| 4 GiB app server | $29.20/mo | $55.00/mo | 0.53x, Dynatrace wins |
| 7.53 GiB | $55.00/mo | $55.00/mo | 1.00x, they meet |
| 8 GiB standard instance | $58.40/mo | $55.00/mo | 1.06x |
| 16 GiB | $116.80/mo | $55.00/mo | 2.12x |
| 32 GiB | $233.60/mo | $55.00/mo | 4.25x |
| 64 GiB database server | $467.20/mo | $55.00/mo | 8.49x |
| 128 GiB memory-optimized | $934.40/mo | $55.00/mo | 16.99x |
Read the bottom two rows before you shortlist. If your estate is memory-optimized database servers, Dynatrace Full-Stack is not marginally more expensive, it is eight to seventeen times more expensive per machine, and the difference is arithmetic rather than negotiation. Twenty 32 GiB hosts is $4,672 a month on Dynatrace Full-Stack against $1,100 on Splunk APM, a swing of $42,864 a year on identical hardware.
The comparison flips if you run compute-dense, low-memory workloads. Container fleets and stateless API nodes often carry 2 GiB or less per instance, and there Dynatrace Full-Stack is a quarter of the Splunk price while giving you deeper tracing than infrastructure monitoring alone. That is a real advantage and it is worth saying clearly, because most write-ups treat Dynatrace as simply the expensive option.
One caveat on the infrastructure tier, since it changes the shortlist for anyone who only wants host metrics. Dynatrace Infrastructure Monitoring is $0.04 per host-hour, a flat $29.20 a month, and Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring starts at $15. Both are flat, so the ratio never moves: Splunk is 1.95 times cheaper on every host, forever. If host metrics are all you need, that row is the whole decision.
uptime and synthetics
On plain uptime checks Dynatrace costs exactly ten times more
This is the part we know best, and the honest answer does not favor us either. Splunk sells synthetic uptime requests at $1 per 10,000, which is $0.0001 a request. Dynatrace sells HTTP synthetic requests at $1.00 per 1,000, which is $0.001. Same job, same one-minute floor, exactly ten times the price. The Dynatrace documentation is precise about the counting: one request is consumed each time a monitor runs, for each HTTP request executed, at each location, so a three-location check burns three units per minute.
| Check interval | Runs a month | Splunk uptime requests | Dynatrace HTTP monitor | AlertPing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every 30 seconds | Not offered by either | Not available | Not available | Team plan, $59/mo |
| Every minute, 1 location | 43,833 | $4.38 | $43.83 | Included |
| Every minute, 3 locations | 131,499 | $13.15 | $131.50 | Included |
| Every 5 minutes, 1 location | 8,767 | $0.88 | $8.77 | Included |
| Every 15 minutes, 1 location | 2,922 | $0.29 | $2.92 | Included |
| 10 monitors, 1 minute, 3 locations | 1,314,990 | $131.50 | $1,314.99 | Included |
We should be straight about the bottom of that table, because it is the row that argues against us. At $0.0001 a request, ten one-minute checks from three locations is $131.50 a month on Splunk, and a single one-minute check is $4.38. That is cheaper than our $19 entry plan for the pinging itself. If raw check volume is the only thing you are buying and you are already a Splunk customer, the metered rate wins on price and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
The caveat is what that $4.38 does not include. Splunk synthetic uptime requests are an add-on to Observability Cloud, not a standalone product, so the real floor is the platform underneath it: $15 per host a month at minimum, billed annually, before the first check runs. The requests also buy you a check and a graph. Escalation policies, SMS to the person on call, a public status page your support team can point customers at, and confirmation from a second and third region before anyone gets woken up are all somewhere else in the stack. And the interval floor is one minute at any price.
Browser synthetics run the other way, and here Splunk is the flat one. Splunk charges $12 per test location a month, unchanged whether the script runs hourly or every minute. Dynatrace charges $4.50 per 1,000 synthetic actions, where every click, navigation and assertion counts as one action. A single-action script at one-minute frequency is 43,833 actions, which is $197.25 a month from one location, and a realistic five-step checkout journey is $986.24. Divide $12 by $0.0045 and the crossover is 2,667 actions a month: with a one-action script Dynatrace is cheaper only below one run every 16.4 minutes, and with a five-action script only below one run every 82 minutes. Almost nobody monitors a checkout that rarely.
| Browser check interval | Dynatrace, 1-action script | Dynatrace, 5-action script | Splunk, 1 test location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Every minute | $197.25 | $986.24 | $12.00 |
| Every 5 minutes | $39.45 | $197.26 | $12.00 |
| Every 15 minutes | $13.15 | $65.74 | $12.00 |
| Every hour | $3.29 | $16.45 | $12.00 |
Real user monitoring follows the uptime pattern rather than the browser one. Splunk is $14 per 10,000 sessions, Dynatrace $2.25 per 1,000, so Dynatrace is 1.61 times more expensive per session. At 250,000 sessions a month that is $350 against $562.50. Dynatrace does include session replay as a separate $4.50 per 1,000 line, which Splunk does not list publicly, so if replay is a requirement the comparison is no longer like for like.
honest scorecard
Where each one actually wins
Dynatrace wins on
- Small, memory-light hosts. Under 7.53 GiB per machine, Full-Stack costs less than Splunk APM and gives deeper tracing than an infrastructure tier.
- Container and stateless fleets, where per-GiB billing is genuinely cheap and a 2 GiB node is $14.60 a month.
- A single coherent rate card. Every meter is published, there is one APM product rather than two overlapping ones, and no seat fees exist at all.
- OneAgent automatic topology discovery and Davis root cause, which name the failing component instead of handing you dashboards to correlate.
- Session replay as a published line item at $4.50 per 1,000 sessions.
Splunk wins on
- Large hosts, decisively. Flat $55 per host APM against $467.20 for a 64 GiB server on Dynatrace Full-Stack.
- Infrastructure monitoring at any size: $15 a host against $29.20, a fixed 1.95 times gap.
- Uptime requests, by exactly ten times. $0.0001 against $0.001 per check, cheaper than our own entry plan for that one job.
- Browser synthetics at real frequencies, at a flat $12 per location against $197.25 for the same one-minute check.
- Real user monitoring, at $0.0014 a session against $0.00225.
- Log analytics heritage, if you already run Splunk Enterprise and want Log Observer Connect against existing indexes.
Where we fit
- We replace neither platform. AlertPing has no APM, no tracing, no RUM, no log analytics and no server agent.
- We check every 30 seconds on the Team plan and up. Both of these floor at one minute at any price, and no contract changes that.
- Flat pricing with no hosts, no gigabytes and no metering: $19 a month for 20 monitors at 60-second checks, $59 for 30-second checks.
- SMS on every plan and a public status page included, neither of which is an observability platform feature.
- Alerting from outside your cloud account, which matters on the day the account itself is the outage.
buyer scenarios
Pick by your hardware, not by the demo
- Memory-heavy database estate. Splunk, and it is not close. Every 64 GiB server is $55 against $467.20. Ask specifically for Observability Cloud APM rather than an AppDynamics per-vCPU quote.
- Kubernetes and container fleets. Dynatrace. Nodes carrying 2 to 4 GiB bill at $14.60 to $29.20 against a flat $55, and OneAgent discovery handles churn well.
- Host metrics only, no tracing. Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring at $15 a host. The 1.95 times gap against Dynatrace never narrows at any scale.
- Heavy browser journey testing. Splunk, on the flat $12 per location rate, which is the AppDynamics meter. At one-minute frequency Dynatrace is sixteen times more for a single-action script.
- A handful of low-frequency browser scripts. Dynatrace, if you genuinely run them less than every 16 minutes. Below 2,667 actions a month the metered rate is cheaper.
- You only need to know whether the site is up. Neither. Both are platforms priced for tracing, and the entry cost is a host fee before the first check. A flat uptime plan does that job from $19 a month, at 30-second resolution from $59.
- You already run one of them and downtime still surprised you. Keep the platform and add an external check. The gap is usually detection speed and who gets woken up, not visibility.
plainly
What AlertPing does not do
We are the third option on this page, not the replacement for either. If any of the following is on your requirements list, buy Dynatrace or Splunk and treat us as the external check that sits alongside them.
- No distributed tracing, no code-level profiling, no service maps.
- No real user monitoring and no session replay.
- No log ingestion, indexing or querying.
- No server agent, so no CPU, memory or disk metrics from inside the host.
- No scripted multi-step browser journeys. We check endpoints, status codes, keywords and JSON paths, not checkout flows.
- No application security or vulnerability analytics.
- No free plan, and no 30-second checks on our entry tier either. Starter is $19 a month at 60-second checks; 30-second checks start at $59.
What we do is narrow on purpose: check as often as every 30 seconds from three regions, confirm the failure from a second and third location before alerting, and reach a human by SMS, email, Slack or webhook. If you want that alongside your platform, the case for pairing an uptime tool with APM lays out when a second tool is worth it and when it plainly is not.
questions
Dynatrace vs Splunk, answered
Dynatrace vs Splunk: which is better?
It depends on host memory, not on quality. Splunk charges a flat $55 per host for APM and Dynatrace $7.30 per GiB of RAM, so they cross at 7.53 GiB. Memory-heavy fleets are far cheaper on Splunk, container and low-memory fleets cheaper on Dynatrace. Dynatrace has the cleaner single rate card; Splunk has cheaper synthetics and infrastructure monitoring.
Dynatrace vs Splunk cost: which is cheaper?
Splunk, for most real fleets. Dynatrace Full-Stack is $58 a month for an 8 GiB host and rises with memory, reaching $467.20 on a 64 GiB server. Splunk Observability Cloud APM is a flat $55 per host at any size. Dynatrace is only cheaper below 7.53 GiB of RAM per machine, which in practice means containers.
How much does Splunk Observability Cloud cost?
Infrastructure Monitoring starts at $15 per host a month billed annually and APM at $55 per host. Bundled editions are $15, $60 and $75 per host for Starter, Growth and Enterprise. Consumption products are separate: $1 per 10,000 synthetic uptime requests, $12 per browser test location a month and $14 per 10,000 RUM sessions.
Is Splunk the same company as AppDynamics?
Yes. Cisco acquired AppDynamics and then Splunk, and the product is now sold as Splunk AppDynamics. The old appdynamics.com pricing URL 301-redirects to Splunk observability pricing. That means Splunk offers two APM products on one rate card: Observability Cloud APM per host, and AppDynamics per virtual CPU.
Which is cheaper for uptime monitoring, Dynatrace or Splunk?
Splunk, by exactly ten times. Splunk charges $1 per 10,000 synthetic uptime requests and Dynatrace $1.00 per 1,000. A one-minute check from one location is $4.38 a month on Splunk against $43.83 on Dynatrace, and from three locations $13.15 against $131.50. Both floor at a one-minute interval.
Does Dynatrace or Splunk do 30-second checks?
Neither does. Dynatrace publishes 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 30 and 60 minute synthetic frequencies, and Splunk AppDynamics documentation gives one minute as the minimum for API monitoring. Datadog and New Relic share the same floor. One minute is the category limit and no contract changes it.
Which is cheaper for browser synthetic monitoring?
Splunk, at any realistic frequency. 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 and a five-step checkout journey is $986.24. Dynatrace only becomes cheaper below roughly one run every 16 minutes.
Dynatrace vs Splunk vs Datadog: how do the three compare?
All three are full observability platforms flooring at one-minute checks. They differ on billing axis: Dynatrace on host memory, Splunk on flat per-host plus consumption, Datadog on a per-product mix with per-run synthetics. Splunk is the cheapest of the three for large hosts and for plain uptime requests.
Can I use Dynatrace just for uptime monitoring?
Technically yes with HTTP monitors, but the economics are poor. One one-minute check from a single location is $43.83 a month and three locations is $131.50, for a slower interval than a $19 flat plan. Dynatrace earns its price on tracing and root cause, not on pinging a URL.
Does Splunk Observability Cloud charge per user?
No seat price is published. Splunk Observability Cloud is priced per host and per consumption unit, and Dynatrace has no seat licensing at all. Neither vendor charges you to put more engineers in the console, which is a meaningful difference from New Relic, where full platform users are billed individually.
keep reading
Related comparisons
- How much Splunk Observability Cloud costs, the full rate card with three worked bills.
- Splunk vs New Relic pricing, per host against per seat, and the 6.35 hosts per engineer break-even.
- AppDynamics vs Dynatrace pricing, the other half of the Splunk portfolio and the 4.52 GiB per vCPU break-even.
- Datadog vs Dynatrace pricing, including the per-action versus per-run browser billing flip.
- New Relic vs Dynatrace pricing, seat billing against host billing.
- Datadog vs New Relic synthetics pricing.
- 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.
- 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 and a status page on every plan, flat from $19 a month with no hosts, no gigabytes and no metering. 30-second checks from $59.