Vegeta vs NeoLoad
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 sourceQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Enterprise licensing by peak virtual users, negotiated annually.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free edition limited to a small number of virtual users.
Open source
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
OSS community · since 2013
Established
Tricentis · since 2005
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.
- 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.
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.
- Expensive, with a procurement-scale sales process.
- Overkill for a straightforward web or API workload.
- Proprietary scripts do not port to other tools.
Best for
Backend engineers who want rigorous constant-rate measurements of an endpoint.
Large enterprises performance-testing SAP, Citrix or Oracle estates.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.