NeoLoad 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.
Enterprise licensing by peak virtual users, negotiated annually.
Open source and free, including distributed runs on your own AWS account. You pay AWS, not Artillery.
Free tier
Free edition limited to a small number of virtual users.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
MPL-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
Tricentis · since 2005
Widely used
Artillery Software · since 2015
Strengths
- 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.
- 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
- Expensive, with a procurement-scale sales process.
- Overkill for a straightforward web or API workload.
- Proprietary scripts do not port to other tools.
- 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 performance-testing SAP, Citrix or Oracle estates.
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.