Grafana k6 vs Artillery

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

Free and open source

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

Open source and free, including distributed runs on your own AWS account. You pay AWS, not Artillery.

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

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Grafana Labs · since 2016

Widely used

Artillery Software · since 2015

• 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.

• Distributed load on your own AWS account, so no per-virtual-user vendor pricing at all.
• Reuses Playwright scripts for browser-level load without rewriting journeys.
• YAML for simple scenarios, JavaScript when you need real logic.

• 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.

• Serverless distribution requires AWS knowledge and IAM setup.
• Reporting is basic without exporting to an observability platform.
• Smaller community than k6 or JMeter.

Engineering teams that want performance regression tests running in CI.

AWS-native teams that want large-scale load tests without vendor VU pricing.