Artillery vs autocannon

Free and open source

Free and open source

Open source and free, including distributed runs on your own AWS account. You pay AWS, not Artillery.

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

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Artillery Software · since 2015

Established

OSS community · since 2016

• 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.

• Zero configuration; useful output in seconds.
• Good percentile reporting for such a small tool.
• Scriptable from Node for micro-benchmarks in CI.

• Serverless distribution requires AWS knowledge and IAM setup.
• Reporting is basic without exporting to an observability platform.
• Smaller community than k6 or JMeter.

• Single endpoint only — no user journeys, no correlation, no think time.
• No distributed execution.
• HTTP/1.1 focused.

AWS-native teams that want large-scale load tests without vendor VU pricing.

Quick endpoint benchmarks and micro-optimisation work.