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. Costs are load-generator infrastructure and, commonly, a cloud execution service such as BlazeMeter.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
Apache-2.0
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Apache Software Foundation · since 1998
Widely used
OSS community · since 2011
Strengths
Limitations
Best for
Enterprise performance teams needing protocol breadth and a GUI-based workflow.
Python teams who want load scenarios expressed in their own language.
All of these integrate with: Grafana.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.