Gatling vs OpenText LoadRunner

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

Quote on request

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

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

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

Community edition with a 50-virtual-user limit.

Widely used

Gatling Corp · since 2012

Established

OpenText · since 1993

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

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