Artillery vs Grafana k6

Free and open source

From $19 per month (Grafana Cloud Pro platform fee; k6 usage is billed on top)

Open source and free, including distributed runs on your own AWS account. You pay AWS, not Artillery.

Self-hosted is free and unlimited. On Grafana Cloud the free tier includes 500 virtual-user-hours a month, then k6 bills from $0.150 per virtual-user-hour on top of the $19 Pro platform fee — the VU-hours, not the platform fee, are where budgets go.

Everything, self-hosted

The k6 CLI is fully open source with no virtual-user limits when self-run.

Widely used

Artillery Software · since 2015

Category standard

Grafana Labs · since 2016

• 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.

• Excellent resource efficiency — thousands of virtual users from one modest machine.
• Thresholds make performance a build gate rather than a report nobody reads.
• Native Grafana and Prometheus integration ties load results to server-side metrics.

• Serverless distribution requires AWS knowledge and IAM setup.
• Reporting is basic without exporting to an observability platform.
• Smaller community than k6 or JMeter.

• The JavaScript runtime is not Node — no npm modules unless bundled, which surprises people.
• Browser-level load testing exists but is much heavier and less mature than protocol-level testing.
• Distributed execution requires either the cloud product or your own orchestration.

AWS-native teams that want large-scale load tests without vendor VU pricing.

Engineering teams that want performance regression tests running in CI.