Artillery vs BlazeMeter
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Free and open source
Open sourceFrom $149 per month (indicative entry plan)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Open source and free, including distributed runs on your own AWS account. You pay AWS, not Artillery.
Priced by concurrent virtual users. Large enterprise tests are a substantial annual commitment.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free tier with a small virtual-user cap and limited test duration.
Open source
MPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Artillery Software · since 2015
Widely used
Broadcom · since 2011
Strengths
- Distributed load on your own AWS account, so no per-virtual-user vendor pricing at all.
- Reuses Playwright scripts for browser-level load without rewriting journeys.
- YAML for simple scenarios, JavaScript when you need real logic.
- Runs your existing open-source scripts unchanged — no migration cost.
- Global load generation from many regions without owning infrastructure.
- Reporting and trend analysis suited to handing results to management.
Limitations
- Serverless distribution requires AWS knowledge and IAM setup.
- Reporting is basic without exporting to an observability platform.
- Smaller community than k6 or JMeter.
- Expensive relative to running the same open-source scripts on your own machines.
- Virtual-user pricing makes frequent large tests costly.
- Adds a vendor to a workflow that can function entirely on open source.
Best for
AWS-native teams that want large-scale load tests without vendor VU pricing.
Enterprises with existing JMeter estates that need scale and reporting without building it.
All of these integrate with: Datadog.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.