autocannon vs OpenText LoadRunner

Free and open source

Quote on request

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

Licensed by peak virtual users with protocol bundles priced separately. Historically among the most expensive tools in testing.

Everything, self-hosted

Community edition with a 50-virtual-user limit.

Established

OSS community · since 2016

Established

OpenText · since 1993

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

• The broadest protocol coverage available anywhere.
• Extremely mature analysis and correlation tooling.
• Accepted by enterprise architecture and audit functions without argument.

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

• Very expensive, and the protocol-bundle licensing model is hard to predict.
• Dated tooling and a steep learning curve; specialists are a distinct job role.
• Poor fit for continuous, developer-run performance testing.

Quick endpoint benchmarks and micro-optimisation work.

Large enterprises with legacy protocol requirements and an existing performance-engineering team.