NeoLoad vs Grafana k6

Quote on request

From $19 per month (Grafana Cloud Pro platform fee; k6 usage is billed on top)

Enterprise licensing by peak virtual users, negotiated annually.

Self-hosted is free and unlimited. On Grafana Cloud the free tier includes 500 virtual-user-hours a month, then k6 bills from $0.150 per virtual-user-hour on top of the $19 Pro platform fee — the VU-hours, not the platform fee, are where budgets go.

Free edition limited to a small number of virtual users.

The k6 CLI is fully open source with no virtual-user limits when self-run.

Established

Tricentis · since 2005

Category standard

Grafana Labs · since 2016

• 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.

• Excellent resource efficiency — thousands of virtual users from one modest machine.
• Thresholds make performance a build gate rather than a report nobody reads.
• Native Grafana and Prometheus integration ties load results to server-side metrics.

• Expensive, with a procurement-scale sales process.
• Overkill for a straightforward web or API workload.
• Proprietary scripts do not port to other tools.

• The JavaScript runtime is not Node — no npm modules unless bundled, which surprises people.
• Browser-level load testing exists but is much heavier and less mature than protocol-level testing.
• Distributed execution requires either the cloud product or your own orchestration.

Large enterprises performance-testing SAP, Citrix or Oracle estates.

Engineering teams that want performance regression tests running in CI.