Artillery vs OpenText LoadRunner
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 sourceQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat 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.
Licensed by peak virtual users with protocol bundles priced separately. Historically among the most expensive tools in testing.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Community edition with a 50-virtual-user limit.
Open source
MPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Artillery Software · since 2015
Established
OpenText · since 1993
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.
- The broadest protocol coverage available anywhere.
- Extremely mature analysis and correlation tooling.
- Accepted by enterprise architecture and audit functions without argument.
Limitations
- Serverless distribution requires AWS knowledge and IAM setup.
- Reporting is basic without exporting to an observability platform.
- Smaller community than k6 or JMeter.
- Very expensive, and the protocol-bundle licensing model is hard to predict.
- Dated tooling and a steep learning curve; specialists are a distinct job role.
- Poor fit for continuous, developer-run performance testing.
Best for
AWS-native teams that want large-scale load tests without vendor VU pricing.
Large enterprises with legacy protocol requirements and an existing performance-engineering team.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.