Start with what you will not read in other comparisons: if you already run Dynatrace and it works, price is probably not your reason to move. Its hourly billing is good. The difference is elsewhere.
Dynatrace bills hourly, not monthly. Full-Stack Monitoring is USD 0.01 per GiB of memory per hour, so an 8 GiB host is around USD 58 per month. Infrastructure Monitoring is USD 0.04 per host-hour, about USD 29 per month. Foundation & Discovery is USD 0.01 per host-hour, about USD 7.
Hourly matters a great deal in Kubernetes, and it deserves to be said clearly: a node that existed for three days bills 72 hours, not a whole month. That removes the effect where a short traffic spike sets the bill for the entire month, which is the central problem with per-host billing.
And billing by memory rather than host count means consolidating workloads does not punish you. Two 16 GiB nodes cost the same as four 8 GiB ones. It is a well-designed model.
The hourly price draws down from an annual platform-level commitment. You contract an amount for the year and each capability you use consumes it at rate-card prices.
The advantage is no overage penalties and no enablement surprises: everything is available from day one. The difficulty is that you have to forecast a year of consumption, and in Kubernetes forecasting memory-hours is hard for exactly the reason hourly billing is attractive — the cluster moves.
Go over and you renegotiate early. Come under and you paid for capacity you did not use. Neither is catastrophic, but both need attention a commitment-free model does not ask for.
There is also a reported 4 GiB per-host floor regardless of actual memory. We could not verify it in the official documentation, so we flag it as third-party: if your nodes are small, confirm it before doing the maths.
A 40-node cluster with 400 GiB of RAM in total pays, on Full-Stack, about USD 2,920 per month: 400 GiB times 730 hours times USD 0.01. The same cluster with 300 vCPU pays USD 5,450 on Moonin, because that is 300 units and the tiers are 100 × 20 plus 150 × 18 plus 50 × 15.
Dynatrace is cheaper there — nearly twice as cheap — and saying so is more useful than hiding it. What changes with memory-heavy nodes is not who wins but by how much: a 2,560 GiB cluster is about USD 18,688 per month on Full-Stack, and the 1,280 units that means on Moonin land around that same figure. The gap goes from 1.87× to 1.08: practically a tie.
The honest conclusion, then, is that on list price Dynatrace comes out cheaper — a lot on clusters with little memory per vCPU, and barely on memory-heavy ones. If you came looking for a guaranteed saving against Dynatrace, there is not one, and we would rather you learned that on this page than in a meeting.
And there is a deeper reason the comparison is unfair: Full-Stack includes an instrumented APM with code-level visibility. Moonin does not do that. Comparing the prices directly compares two different products.
The first is scope. Dynatrace is a platform you adopt: OneAgent on every host, automatic discovery of everything, and its own data model you then live in. Moonin is a tool you add, answers two questions, and does not aim to be the place where you look at everything.
The second is which questions it answers. Moonin is built around one idea: what changed in the cluster and what broke afterwards. It keeps a revision history per service with image and commit, and computes DORA metrics from that history rather than from a form. That is a delivery view, not a performance one.
The third is the 16 MCP tools, all read-only, that let you ask the cluster questions from an AI assistant in plain language without opening the portal. That is a different way to query, not a cheaper version of the same one.
And the fourth is installation: one Helm chart per cluster, with traces collected by eBPF in the kernel and no code instrumentation. That agent does need node privileges to read kernel traffic — the trade-off for not touching your applications, documented agent by agent.
If you need code-level visibility — CPU per method, traces with your business annotations, automatic root cause across full stacks — Dynatrace does that and Moonin does not. Switching to save money would be a bad trade.
If your value is in Davis automatic anomaly detection across the whole platform, that has no equivalent here either.
If you already forecast and negotiated your annual commitment and the maths works, there is no problem to solve. Moving costs effort and that effort has to buy something.
And if your team depends on hand-built dashboards over your own data, that stays where it is: Moonin is not a dashboard engine.
The clear case is when you are paying Full-Stack on services where nobody looks at per-method CPU profiles, and what actually gets consulted is what was deployed and when. There you are paying for a full APM to answer a delivery question.
The second is when the annual commitment forces you to decide today how much memory you will run in twelve months, and you would prefer a cost that depends on declared size rather than on hours.
The third is when you want the person on call to check cluster state from the assistant they already use, instead of learning a query language.
And in all of them the sensible way to find out is running both in parallel: Moonin access to the Kubernetes API is read-only and does not interfere with OneAgent.
The question that settles the decision is not how much you pay but what you use it for: if Full-Stack on most of your services gets consulted to find out what was deployed, there is something to review. If it gets used to profile code, there is not.
About usPricingSecurity and permissionsPartner programmevs Datadogvs Prometheus & Grafanavs New Relicvs Dynatracevs ELK and ElasticsearchCrashLoopBackOffOOMKilledImagePullBackOffPod stuck in PendingDocumentationDemoSign upContact usArguz, the consultancy
On list price, no. A 400 GiB cluster is about USD 2,920 per month on Dynatrace Full-Stack against USD 5,450 for Moonin at 300 units, nearly double. With memory-heavy nodes the gap closes to practically a tie, 1.08×. The comparison is also imperfect in both directions, because Full-Stack includes an instrumented APM with code-level visibility that Moonin does not have. The argument for moving is not price, it is scope.
To a large extent yes, and that deserves acknowledgement. Because it bills hourly, a node that existed for three days pays 72 hours rather than a full month. That removes the effect where a short spike sets a thirty-day bill, which is the central flaw of per-host billing. What remains is forecasting the annual commitment.
Scope. Dynatrace is a platform you adopt, with an agent on every host and code-level visibility. Moonin is a tool you add to answer what changed in the cluster and what broke afterwards, with revision history, DORA metrics computed from that history, and 16 read-only MCP tools for querying from an assistant.
Yes, and that is the recommended way to evaluate. Moonin access to the Kubernetes API is read-only and does not interfere with OneAgent. Two or three weeks in parallel give you your own data to decide which services were using a full APM to answer a delivery question.
It appears in third-party analyses and we could not confirm it in official Dynatrace documentation. If your nodes are small the difference matters, so confirm it with them before doing the maths. We prefer to state the doubt rather than publish a figure we did not verify.