Artillery vs Locust

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.

ArtilleryLocust

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

Free and open source

Open source

What 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.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

MPL-2.0

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptCodeless

Python

Platforms

APIWeb

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Artillery Software · since 2015

Widely used

OSS community · 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.

Test scenarios are plain Python, so any logic is expressible without workarounds.
Distributed mode is conceptually simple and works well on Kubernetes.
Live web UI is useful during an exploratory ramp-up.

Limitations

Python's per-user overhead is higher than k6 or Gatling; big loads need more machines.
Reporting is basic — plan on exporting to Grafana.
HTTP-centric; other protocols require writing your own client.

Best for

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

Python teams who want load scenarios expressed in their own language.

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.