Gatling 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
From €89 per month (indicative, Enterprise Cloud entry)
Free tierFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Open source is free; Enterprise adds distributed injectors and reporting, billed by virtual-user-hours.
Open source and free, including distributed runs on your own AWS account. You pay AWS, not Artillery.
Free tier
Gatling open source is complete for single-machine load generation.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
MPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Gatling Corp · since 2012
Widely used
Artillery Software · since 2015
Strengths
- Very high throughput per load generator thanks to the async architecture.
- Code-first scenarios that review, diff and refactor properly.
- The default HTML report is genuinely good enough to hand to a stakeholder.
- 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
- Historically Scala-first; the Java and JavaScript DSLs are newer and less documented.
- Fewer protocols than JMeter.
- Distributed load without the enterprise product means building your own orchestration.
- 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
JVM teams wanting code-first performance tests with excellent reporting.
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.