autocannon vs Artillery
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 sourceFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Open source and free, including distributed runs on your own AWS account. You pay AWS, not Artillery.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
MIT
MPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
OSS community · since 2016
Widely used
Artillery Software · since 2015
Strengths
- Zero configuration; useful output in seconds.
- Good percentile reporting for such a small tool.
- Scriptable from Node for micro-benchmarks in CI.
- 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.
Limitations
- Single endpoint only — no user journeys, no correlation, no think time.
- No distributed execution.
- HTTP/1.1 focused.
- Serverless distribution requires AWS knowledge and IAM setup.
- Reporting is basic without exporting to an observability platform.
- Smaller community than k6 or JMeter.
Best for
Quick endpoint benchmarks and micro-optimisation work.
AWS-native teams that want large-scale load tests without vendor VU pricing.
All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.