Artillery vs Gatling
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 €89 per month (indicative, Enterprise Cloud entry)
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.
Open source is free; Enterprise adds distributed injectors and reporting, billed by virtual-user-hours.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Gatling open source is complete for single-machine load generation.
Open source
MPL-2.0
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Artillery Software · since 2015
Widely used
Gatling Corp · since 2012
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.
- Very high throughput per load generator thanks to the async architecture.
- Code-first scenarios that review, diff and refactor properly.
- The default HTML report is genuinely good enough to hand to a stakeholder.
Limitations
- Serverless distribution requires AWS knowledge and IAM setup.
- Reporting is basic without exporting to an observability platform.
- Smaller community than k6 or JMeter.
- Historically Scala-first; the Java and JavaScript DSLs are newer and less documented.
- Fewer protocols than JMeter.
- Distributed load without the enterprise product means building your own orchestration.
Best for
AWS-native teams that want large-scale load tests without vendor VU pricing.
JVM teams wanting code-first performance tests with excellent reporting.
All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.