NeoLoad 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
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.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Free edition limited to a small number of virtual users.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
Tricentis · since 2005
Established
OSS community · since 2016
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.
- Zero configuration; useful output in seconds.
- Good percentile reporting for such a small tool.
- Scriptable from Node for micro-benchmarks in CI.
Limitations
- Expensive, with a procurement-scale sales process.
- Overkill for a straightforward web or API workload.
- Proprietary scripts do not port to other tools.
- Single endpoint only — no user journeys, no correlation, no think time.
- No distributed execution.
- HTTP/1.1 focused.
Best for
Large enterprises performance-testing SAP, Citrix or Oracle estates.
Quick endpoint benchmarks and micro-optimisation work.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.