autocannon vs BlazeMeter

Free and open source

From $149 per month (indicative entry plan)

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

Priced by concurrent virtual users. Large enterprise tests are a substantial annual commitment.

Everything, self-hosted

Free tier with a small virtual-user cap and limited test duration.

Established

OSS community · since 2016

Widely used

Broadcom · since 2011

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

• Runs your existing open-source scripts unchanged — no migration cost.
• Global load generation from many regions without owning infrastructure.
• Reporting and trend analysis suited to handing results to management.

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

• Expensive relative to running the same open-source scripts on your own machines.
• Virtual-user pricing makes frequent large tests costly.
• Adds a vendor to a workflow that can function entirely on open source.

Quick endpoint benchmarks and micro-optimisation work.

Enterprises with existing JMeter estates that need scale and reporting without building it.