autocannon vs Gatling

Free and open source

From €89 per month (indicative, Enterprise Cloud entry)

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

Open source is free; Enterprise adds distributed injectors and reporting, billed by virtual-user-hours.

Everything, self-hosted

Gatling open source is complete for single-machine load generation.

Established

OSS community · since 2016

Widely used

Gatling Corp · since 2012

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

• Very high throughput per load generator thanks to the async architecture.
• Code-first scenarios that review, diff and refactor properly.
• The default HTML report is genuinely good enough to hand to a stakeholder.

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

• Historically Scala-first; the Java and JavaScript DSLs are newer and less documented.
• Fewer protocols than JMeter.
• Distributed load without the enterprise product means building your own orchestration.

Quick endpoint benchmarks and micro-optimisation work.

JVM teams wanting code-first performance tests with excellent reporting.