Gatling vs Grafana k6

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

From $19 per month (indicative, Grafana Cloud k6 entry)

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

Self-hosted is free and unlimited. Cloud plans are billed by virtual-user-hours, which is where budgets go.

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

The k6 CLI is fully open source with no virtual-user limits when self-run.

Widely used

Gatling Corp · since 2012

Category standard

Grafana Labs · since 2016

• 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.

• Excellent resource efficiency — thousands of virtual users from one modest machine.
• Thresholds make performance a build gate rather than a report nobody reads.
• Native Grafana and Prometheus integration ties load results to server-side metrics.

• 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.

• The JavaScript runtime is not Node — no npm modules unless bundled, which surprises people.
• Browser-level load testing exists but is much heavier and less mature than protocol-level testing.
• Distributed execution requires either the cloud product or your own orchestration.

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

Engineering teams that want performance regression tests running in CI.