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testcritic

Vegeta 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

Free and open source

Open source

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

MIT

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

Go
JavaScript

Platforms

API
API

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market
Solo / side projectStartup

Adoption

Established

OSS community · since 2013

Established

OSS community · since 2016

Strengths

  • Constant-rate model avoids the coordinated-omission problem that distorts VU-based tools.
  • Single static binary, trivial to run anywhere.
  • Composable output for scripting and pipelines.
  • Zero configuration; useful output in seconds.
  • Good percentile reporting for such a small tool.
  • Scriptable from Node for micro-benchmarks in CI.

Limitations

  • No scenarios or session state — one target list, one rate.
  • No GUI or built-in reporting beyond plots.
  • Go library usage required for anything sophisticated.
  • Single endpoint only — no user journeys, no correlation, no think time.
  • No distributed execution.
  • HTTP/1.1 focused.

Best for

Backend engineers who want rigorous constant-rate measurements of an endpoint.

Quick endpoint benchmarks and micro-optimisation work.

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.