Artillery vs NeoLoad
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.
Enterprise licensing by peak virtual users, negotiated annually.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free edition limited to a small number of virtual users.
Open source
MPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Artillery Software · since 2015
Established
Tricentis · since 2005
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.
- Handles enterprise protocols such as SAP GUI and Citrix that open-source tools cannot.
- APM correlation makes root-cause analysis much faster than latency graphs alone.
- Both GUI design and as-code authoring, so mixed-skill teams can share a suite.
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, with a procurement-scale sales process.
- Overkill for a straightforward web or API workload.
- Proprietary scripts do not port to other tools.
Best for
AWS-native teams that want large-scale load tests without vendor VU pricing.
Large enterprises performance-testing SAP, Citrix or Oracle estates.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.