Gatling 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
From €89 per month (indicative, Enterprise Cloud entry)
Free tierQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat 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.
Enterprise licensing by peak virtual users, negotiated annually.
Free tier
Gatling open source is complete for single-machine load generation.
Free edition limited to a small number of virtual users.
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Gatling Corp · since 2012
Established
Tricentis · since 2005
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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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
JVM teams wanting code-first performance tests with excellent reporting.
Large enterprises performance-testing SAP, Citrix or Oracle estates.
All of these integrate with: Jenkins.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.