autocannon 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.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
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
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
OSS community · since 2016
Established
Tricentis · since 2005
Strengths
- Zero configuration; useful output in seconds.
- Good percentile reporting for such a small tool.
- Scriptable from Node for micro-benchmarks in CI.
- 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
- Single endpoint only — no user journeys, no correlation, no think time.
- No distributed execution.
- HTTP/1.1 focused.
- 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
Quick endpoint benchmarks and micro-optimisation work.
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.