OpenText LoadRunner 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
Quote on request
Quote onlyFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Licensed by peak virtual users with protocol bundles priced separately. Historically among the most expensive tools in testing.
Open source and free, including distributed runs on your own AWS account. You pay AWS, not Artillery.
Free tier
Community edition with a 50-virtual-user limit.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
MPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
OpenText · since 1993
Widely used
Artillery Software · since 2015
Strengths
- The broadest protocol coverage available anywhere.
- Extremely mature analysis and correlation tooling.
- Accepted by enterprise architecture and audit functions without argument.
- 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
- Very expensive, and the protocol-bundle licensing model is hard to predict.
- Dated tooling and a steep learning curve; specialists are a distinct job role.
- Poor fit for continuous, developer-run performance testing.
- 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
Large enterprises with legacy protocol requirements and an existing performance-engineering team.
AWS-native teams that want large-scale load tests without vendor VU pricing.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.