Gatling vs autocannon
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.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Gatling open source is complete for single-machine load generation.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Gatling Corp · since 2012
Established
OSS community · since 2016
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.
- Zero configuration; useful output in seconds.
- Good percentile reporting for such a small tool.
- Scriptable from Node for micro-benchmarks in CI.
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.
- Single endpoint only — no user journeys, no correlation, no think time.
- No distributed execution.
- HTTP/1.1 focused.
Best for
JVM teams wanting code-first performance tests with excellent reporting.
Quick endpoint benchmarks and micro-optimisation work.
All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.